


Star Wars Episode IX: The Reckoning of the Force

by aimee_too



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Ben Solo Lives, Canon Rewrite, Do-Over, F/F, F/M, Fix-It, Force-Sensitive Finn (Star Wars), Gen, HAROLD THEY'RE LESBIANS, Happy Ending, Holding Hands, Kissing, Mostly Gen, Poe Dameron Is A Mess, Queer Character, Queer Character WITH A NAME, Redeemed Ben Solo, Redemption, Rewrite, Rey Needs A Hug, Rey is Not a Palpatine, Rose Tico Deserved Better, Stormtrooper Rebellion, also poe is bi sorry i don't make the rules, and a storyline, but you gotta earn it, let finn be awesome, let rose be literally there at all, thanks i hate it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-07
Updated: 2020-02-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:27:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 34
Words: 62,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22594762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aimee_too/pseuds/aimee_too
Summary: An alternate version of Episode IX.Kylo Ren scours the galaxy for the Emperor's rumored lost fleet: with this power at his back the First Order can easily overrun  and occupy the entire known galaxy. Meanwhile, the Resistance scrambles for intel on why the First Order has gone comparatively quiet, but struggles in the wake of the abrupt departure of General Leia Organa for parts unknown.Rey has isolated herself from the Force, doubting her ability to hold off the storm of Ren's rage forever. Finn wonders what his calling in all this is. Poe knows what his was supposed to be, but can't seem to find a way to take it up without feeling like he's lost in Leia's shadow.Meanwhile, an epic final confrontation between the light and dark sides of the Force is brewing.Starts moderately similar to canon and diverges more with added chapters.
Relationships: Finn/Rose Tico, Poe Dameron & Finn & Rey, Poe Dameron/Rey, Zorii Bliss/Jannah
Comments: 57
Kudos: 37





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kylo Ren investigates an ancient Sith temple in the Hanging Cities of Hast Ovath, and interrogates a presence in the dark side that he finds there.

_A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away …_

  
EPISODE IX  
THE RECKONING OF THE FORCE

  
The galaxy holds its breath! While the fractured remnants of the RESISTANCE forces gather their strength, the FIRST ORDER’s attention has turned elsewhere. SUPREME LEADER KYLO REN scours the furthest reaches to secure the EMPEROR’s lost fleet. With it in his clutches, he will have the firepower to crush not only the Resistance but the last independent worlds. A unified galaxy is nearly within his grasp.

Unaware of Ren’s plans, the Resistance gathers what strength it can. A few surviving heroes of the REBELLION have rallied to GENERAL LEIA ORGANA’s call for aid. But the general herself has vanished on a private mission. Without further instruction from Leia, REY, the last hope of the JEDI, seeks to complete her own training. Meanwhile, her friends FINN, POE, and ROSE scour the galaxy for hints of why the First Order holds back …

* * *

In the days of the Old Republic, the Hanging Cities of Hast Ovath frequently topped lists of desirable destinations for restless travelers. Amongst the lacework of stone pillars carved by long-evaporated floodwaters, bridges and walkways looped like ribbons. A more conservative visitor might keep to the Sunstair, the winding and well-protected path that led from the lower city to nearly its apex. Risk-takers, on the other hand, might enjoy navigating the chain bridges that crisscrossed the wind chasms beneath the city, or network of ropey Wingwalks by which local children navigated the city’s heights.

  
Those days, of course, were in the past. Imperial ordnance had long since caved in the Sunstair, forcing residents and visitors alike to navigate the city by less reliable means. Imperial control had had similar effects on the planet’s economy. 

  
Where sunny terraces had once swayed in the cooling breezes at the city’s heights, sturdy ordnance factories now rested on trestles in between the arched rock, and the First Order’s colors flew at the gates. No tourists visited Hast Ovath anymore, though there were other sorts of travelers who passed through from time to time.

Though the city’s bright lights had dimmed, though the people did not celebrate the spring by anointing the wind chasms with perfume nor the first snow with ice candy and midnight readings, there was a certain dignity to the ruins. In the mind’s eye, one might recapture the Hanging Cities in their glory days. But the view from such a vantage was distant, and hazy, and easily eclipsed by a single TIE fighter dropping into view.

It was winter in the hemisphere that housed the Hanging Cities, and the TIE cut a long shadow from the blanket of pale sunlight that covered the halls and houses. Two more TIES arose from behind it, tearing the single shadow into three.

Residents who looked up at their passing quickly ducked inside and shuttered their windows. The local Imperial garrison had been converted into a kornott coop in the aftermath of the Empire’s fall from power, but the First Order had come in not long after. People had not been allowed to forget what it felt like to have an Imperial knife to their throats.

The TIE fighters alit on the landing platform of the garrison-turned-coop: one of the few flat open places in the city large enough to accommodate them, and certainly the only one unlikely to crumble away beneath their weight. The lead fighter’s cockpit opened first. From its unmarked shell, Kylo Ren dropped to the pitted cement. 

A kornott slithered up to him, lashing its long neck. A territorial tom, not one of the egg-layers; it shrilled a challenge at Ren with a flash of its razor-sharp inner beak and a flex of its hindmost claws. 

Ren did not dignify the creature with the touch of his lightsaber. His boot caught it in the neck, crushing hollow silicate bones to glassy powder. He stepped over it while it gasped its last amid broken scales and ichor. He did not need to give an order to motivate his two pilots to follow him. They trod through the wreckage of the creature, staying close on his heels.

Hast Ovath might as well have been inhabited by little more than kornott and ghosts, for all the life Ren saw as he passed down through the city toward the craterous space at its center. The drone of machinery at work echoed down from the ordnance plant. Beside one bridge under repair, a plank of wood rested half-sawn on its stands; a child’s doll dangled between the planks that connected one crooked arch to the next. He did not linger over these things, but they accumulated at the periphery of his attention, to be dealt with later.

As he descended the gusts from the wind chasms in the basin below grew stronger. His cape whipped and strained at its clasp. The chains of the bridges clattered angrily against the bolts that held them down. Some of the stronger bursts threatened to tear his grip entirely free of the shallow handholds carved into the rock.  
Undignified. He stretched out his hand, and stepped out into empty air.

“Sir—!” squawked one of the pilots, grabbing for his sleeve—too late. But Ren did not fall. With the Force rising to meet his every footfall, he strode downward. In the city’s shadows, one outcropping of rock admitted of a curious cleft. From a higher vantage point, it would easily go unnoticed, or appear as nothing more than a crooked shadow. From here, it was unmistakable as what it truly was: an entrance. Ren stepped inside, leaving his pilots far behind to eke out their slow and clumsy progress.

What light penetrated into the cavern from outside did little to illuminate it. Ren reached for his lightsaber, but hesitated. He quested out once more with the Force instead.

A latticework of tubes erupted into red and orange light overhead. Between the lights, gnarled roots reached down through the rock overhead. Some had groped all the way down to the floor, where they spread out, glistening white. At the center of the tumescent mass, different colors streaked the roots in darker shades: brown, and green, and light-swallowing black. 

This must be the altar, then. He had come to the right place after all. The storied Sith Temple of Underhast was real, and its secrets, its treasures, would be his, as they always should have been.

Ren crossed to the altar, kicking through the debris and detritus on the temple floor. Empty meal-cases, bits of trash. A strange acrid smell on the air: the unmistakable stench of raw spice. More oddments to take note of, and come back to in its own due time. 

He removed his glove before he lay his hand on the altar. Voiceless, the altar-mind sang him the symphony of the many species’ lives of which it had drunk, of the glorious days long ago, before Empire and Old Republic alike, when the city had rained blood and tears to appease the Sith chapterhouse quartered here at the height of its strength.

Ren did not care for the stories of ancient triumphs. He would write his own, and the altar-mind could sing of that, in its own time. _Yes. Yes. You have served your masters well. But it is another that I seek. Let me in._

Beneath his palm, the roots twitched. _You seek your grandfather._ _Be careful, Skywalker-son, how closely you follow him._

“That is not my name!” Ren spoke aloud, but punctuated his words with a crack of energy through the Force.

Earless as it was, the altar-mind understood, and squealed not with a mouth but with the pained twisting of its tentacled mass.

_We serve. We serve. We serve._

The roots parted, slowly at first, and then with a last exhausted convolution. Ren knelt, and reached into the crevice revealed beneath.

It was empty.

His fingers twisted. _You dare hide it from me?_

_It is not here. But master, we know the way._

At the far side of the temple, more roots formed together to point to a computer console. Antiquated; obsolete by any modern standard. Ren strode to it and swept dirt and cobwebs aside. The power switch on the side resisted his press, but then gave way with a creak.

Nothing happened.

“It’s dead,” he objected, and could not quite keep the petulant twinge from his voice. He struck the console with the flat of his hand.

_It is waiting._

Impatient, Ren opened a conduit between himself and the dark side and fed the resulting stream into the console. It crackled with electricity, smoking faintly from its vents--but the screen blinked to life. 

The readout was outdated, barely legible by modern standards. But in it, Ren could read a star-chart. A path. A destination. “Mustafar,” he breathed aloud.

“Sir!” 

The shout of his pilots spun him around. They weren’t alone. One held a dirty, weeping woman by the neck; the other had two equally shabby children by their shirt-collars. “We found these trying to sneak out behind your back.”

Ren studied the children, who did not meet his eye. “The temple has obviously been in use. Squatters. Spice runners. Levy dodgers. Typical scum.” He knelt before one child--a boy, he thought. The creature had gone entirely still, drawing breath in short shallow gasps. “Disrespectful of the history here. Heedless of the price typically paid by those who denied the supremacy of the lords of the Sith.”

“We didn’t mean anything,” whined the other child, the younger. “The rain doesn’t get in here and there aren’t ever any ink-bugs--”

Both children gasped when Ren stood in a swirl of cape. “Take them both,” he ordered. He sized them up. They were big enough to turn a wrench with some force, small enough to handle repair work in difficult spaces. “And call a transport. There will be more in the city. We’ll be needing a great deal of warm bodies soon.”

“No!” the mother wailed. “Let them work in your factories! Let them serve you some other way.” You took my oldest twelve years ago.” She clawed at the pilot’s arm, but he held her fast. “Not my babies too!” 

The pilot threw her down and planted his knee in her chest. His blaster tapped the middle of her forehead, between her shuttered eyes, as she moaned in a language Ren didn’t know. “Sir?”

The children were watching him. Staring at him. His tongue lay thick and stupid in his mouth and his officer was waiting for an order--”No.” The word came out ragged, ugly; he smoothed out the ones that followed. “I think it’s best that we make it clear what will happen to their families if they fail to cooperate.”

“Yes, sir.” They marched the children out the door, leaving the weeping woman behind. Ren stepped over her, then paused, looking back over his shoulder for a glimpse of--he didn’t know what. There was nothing to see.

He followed his men outside.

From the darkest corners of the temple, a figure limned in blue light watched him go.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Poe, Finn, and Rose pick up needed intel but argue about tactics.

“It’s your move,” Finn said, and elbowed Poe in the side.

Poe startled out of his reverie. How long had he been waiting for Chewbacca to make a play? Across the holochess board, Chewbacca grinned and warbled a taunt. “Okay, okay. You know you don’t win if I die of old age waiting for you to finish your turn?”

He squinted at his options. The wookiee had pinned him down; he had only two pieces left and the allowable moves for either one of them would provoke an attack from Chewbacca. Standing still wasn’t an option, and there were no square open for retreat. When he groaned, Chewie chortled. 

“Yeah, yeah. If I was two hundred years old I’d have had time to get good at this damn game too.” He converged both of his pieces on Chewie’s nearest fighter. If he was going to go out, he might as well do as much damage on the way as he could. “Let’s get this over with.”

Chewbacca’s piece advanced on his, swinging its miniature battle-ax. It made short work of his pieces, though at least they got in a few good hits before being reduced to holographic rubble. Poe sighed, and hit the reset button. “Four out of seven?”

“No time for a rematch,” called Rose, as she hauled herself up and out of the hydraulic systems bay accompanied by a hiss of steam. Beside Poe, Finn stiffened to a rigid military posture; an impressive feat, considering he was still seated. “That’s the system proximity alert. We’re there.”

Poe lurched out of his seat behind the holochess table. Finn hesitated, then followed behind. “Buckle up,” Poe ordered the others, slinging himself into a seat at the pilot’s yoke. “This old bird’s been taking the hyperspace transition hard lately.” 

Chewbacca yodeled an objection. “Excuse me?” Rose shook her head as she flipped switches, trying to ease the upcoming shift from hyperspace to realspace. “It’s not _my_ fault you haven’t replaced the motivator in a million years. 

“Here we go!” Poe warned. The ship dropped into realspace with a nauseous shudder. 

The Sinta Glacier hung impossibly in the sky in front of them, a hunk of of blue-white ice big enough to make some planets jealous. The light of the local star caught in its massive spires, so that they seemed to glow from within. “It’s so beautiful,” Rose breathed.

“It’s one of the biggest arms dealing hubs in the settled galaxy.”

Her lips pinched. “I’ve seen prettier.”

While Poe coaxed both the ship and his stomach into a comfortable cruise, Finn scanned the console for signs of trouble. “No First Order ships in range. We’re clear.” A black pockmark on the face of the glacier had come into view, at the base between two huge ice pillars. That would be the mining colony: their destination. He put his hand to his ear, scanning through the local bandwidths, listening for a signal. “Our contact says to put into Bay 35-alpha.”

That contact, an Ovissian named Boolio, awaited them once they’d docked and disembarked. He didn’t mince words, ignoring Poe’s proffered handshake: “I don’t have any supplies to send the Resistance this time. Boss noticed the discrepancies in the ledgers. I wish I could help. But it’s not worth my neck to try again.”

“Information’s more valuable than any number of gun casings.” Poe nodded, what he hoped was reassuringly.

“What’s so important it couldn’t get passed through the usual channels?”

Boolio glanced over their assembled faces: Rose, Chewbacca, Finn. Finn shifted his weight from foot to foot, as if the alien miner could smell his First Order days on him. Depending on the species, some aliens could smell stranger things than that. “I heard this from a missile dealer, who got it off one of these generals of theirs.”

Poe grimaced. “Let me guess. Some sort of special favor.” His parents had always described the Empire as comically corrupt; little reason to doubt this modern imitation would be any different. An advance ordnance contract, in exchange for a cushy executive position for a never-do-well son or daughter. Quid pro quo was the grease that kept the machine of any military state in motion. 

“He says it’s that Supreme Leader of theirs,” Boolio went on. “Some private mission of his. Trying to track down some kind of secret fleet, one the old Emperor was building. Hundreds of capital ships. Thousands, maybe. Though I bet we’d have noticed here in Sinta if they’d been sneaking out the supplies to build something like _that_.”

“A secret fleet?” repeated Finn dubiously. “You mean the Lost Wing? That’s just a stupid rumor they tell baby ‘troopers to impress them.”

“It’s real enough he’s looking for it,” Boolio averred.

“But why?”

Boolio shrugged. “I got facts. I don’t got reasons.”

“That’s why they’ve gone slack chasing after us.” Rose’s face was pale as she looked back and forth between her friends. “With a fleet that size, they won’t just be able to take out the Resistance. They could crush the Cosmopolitan Navy of Coruscant, too, and the Merchant Forces that are holding some of the Outer Rim.” She wanted to be told she was wrong, she was crazy, but Finn’s frown and Poe’s distant stare only confirmed her worst suspicions. “They could occupy _every single world_ in the settled galaxy.”

“All right, and what are we supposed to do about that?” Poe’s harsh laugh made her jump. He stepped back, running both hands through his hair. “A massive, hidden, and totally unstoppable military force. I guess your missile dealer didn’t happen to throw in an actual specific location for this mystery fleet, did they?”

“No.” Finn and Rose met eyes behind Poe’s back. Her gaze faltered first. “But I do have Kylo Ren’s recent whereabouts.” He jerked his horn-pointed chin, as if they might see Ren if they glanced over his shoulder.

“Because yesterday he was just two systems over. Stealing the children of Hast Ovath.” He grimaced, and spat on the decking between his boots. “Anyone tall enough to reach the console of a Star Destroyer.”

“That son of a--” Finn’s imminent explosion lost its steam when Rose yanked on his sleeve.

“They’re two systems over,” she said. “That means they’ve probably got surveillance on--”

An alarm klaxon cut her cruelly, predictably short. “We gotta run!” Poe shouted, over the blare of the alarm. “Thanks, Boolio.”

“I’ll keep my ocular orifices open for anything else that might help.”

As they pounded up the ramp into the Falcon to prep for takeoff, Finn grabbed Poe. “Boolio said they were stealing kids. If we try to follow them back to--”

“No. No!” Poe knocked his hand away and kept moving toward the cockpit. “Too dangerous. We have to stay on target.”

“They’re just children.” That was Rose, whose stubborn expression and set shoulders weren’t keeping her from running the pre-launch checklist. “They need our help. What’s the point of the Resistance, if we can’t help the people who need us most?”

“What’s the point of the Resistance once it’s been blown to bits?” If Poe had more sharp words behind those, he bit them off with a violent shake of his head. “The intel is what matters.”

“People are what matter,” said Rose softly.

“And intel will help us avoid more of those people ending up dead.”

Finn frowned down at his own hands on the console. “Leia would never turn her back on something like this.”

“Well, she’s not here, and I’m not her!” Poe snapped. He flipped one last lever, the Falcon’s engines whined to life. Finn and Rose exchanged looks behind his back as the Falcon lifted off and swooped backwards out of the docking bay. Beneath the ship, the colony shrank quickly from a soot-blackened city back to a black scar on the crystalline surface. 

“I’ve got two gunships and a TIE contingent incoming!” Finn pushed back from the console where he’d been counting down the distance until they reached a safe hyperspace radius from the glacier’s mass. “I’ll cover starboard.” Chewie roared, claiming the port side gun well.

“Keep them off our tail!” ordered Poe, just as the Falcon shuddered beneath strafing fire. “We’re almost clear!”

There were a dozen TIES hot in pursuit, with the slower gunships behind them. Finn cursed, swinging around for a better aim at the nearest ones. The gunships were still too far out of the Falcon’s range. One TIE lit up in his sights, and he took fire, converting it to a swirl of white-hot atoms. Chewie’s line of fire slashed across his sight, taking out two more of the fighters. 

Even as Finn whooped in triumph, another pair of fighters crossed too close over his head, raking the Falcon with a series of shots. Somewhere upship, Rose yelped. “I’m on it! I’m on it!” she cried, and footsteps rang out on the deck. 

The smell of burning ozone made Finn’s eyes water. “I’m on it too.” He lined up carefully and took out one of the TIEs. “Poe! What’s the status?”

“We’re outside the safety radius! Hang on, everyone.”

The Falcon jerked. The stars streaked out behind them, erasing the TIEs and gunships alike in their blinding blue-white light.

But the starfield didn’t stay stretched-out for long. The Falcon rumbled deep in its innards and dropped back into realspace in the sights of a browned-out dying star. “Poe? That doesn’t look like home to me.”

“It’s that stupid motivator!” Rose banged a spanner on the offending piece of machinery. “It’s cutting out on us.”

Poe swore. “At least we’re clear of those TIEs. Rose, if you can get that thing in gear for one more long haul--”

He stopped short. Finn could see why. Both gunships had popped out of hyperspace directly behind them.

“How--?” Finn started firing without waiting to have that impossibly large question addressed.

Rose came up with an answer first. “Modularized tracking tech! Even if I can get us set for another long haul, they’ll just follow.”

Silence smothered the Falcon, broken only by the screams of blaster fire, both incoming and outgoing. “Okay,” said Poe finally. “How about a bunch of short jumps?”

“How short?”

“Let’s say: extremely.”

“Poe, what are you planning?”

“... Something stupid.”

The Falcon lurched from realspace to hyperspace and back again--within spitting distance of a massive asteroid’s rocky face. Tongues of burning ozone broke around them and Poe barely yanked the ship up before it kissed dirt. The asteroid’s lacey canyons yawned around the ship. Finn yelped and blasted a new opening into a massive wall of stone before it and the Falcon developed a rapid and unwanted acquaintance. “What’s going on up there?!” he shouted.

“Poe! Are you _lightspeed skipping_?” Rose demanded. “The ship doesn’t have time to calculate a safe jump.”

“And their ships don’t have time to lock on to our signal.” Poe flung the Falcon onto its side, skimming the ship’s back against the side of another canyon as both gunships belched out of hyperspace behind them. Chewie roared. “Yes, Chewie! I know! And I also don’t want me to be doing what I’m doing.” 

One of the gunships had come in too fast and shallow. It got off a last volley of shots as it dug a new canyon out of the cratered surface. “One down!” Finn whooped.  
Rose gritted her teeth as she put her weight into trying to crack open the overheating engine assembly case.

“We’re about to be one motivator down too.”

“Just keep her hanging on!” Poe shot clear of the rock’s surface and the Falcon shuddered back into hyperspace.

When they dropped out, a knot of blue-green gas broke over the Falcon’s much-abused hull. The ship was deep inside a thick soup of interstellar debris, all-encompassing gas clouds broken up by the occasional patter of microasteroids against the Falcon’s surface. “Damn it! I can’t see a thing.”

“If you leap to lightspeed and there’s a star right in front of us, we’re space dust.”

The Falcon bucked, twisted, and dove around a lump of ore-spangled space rock. Finn craned his neck, scanning through the nebular wreckage. “I don’t see them.” He wasn’t sure he would even if the remaining gunship was right on the Falcon’s tail.

“Good.”

“Poe, if there’s a mass shadow--!”

The Falcon’s engines coughed, and held--and screamed. The ship came out of hyperspace one last time, whipping around a pulsing neutron star. Gravity strained at ancient struts; somewhere in her guts, a girder gave way with a shriek of overtaxed metal. Rose tumbled into the rear wall of the hyperdrive casing; the flesh of Finn’s face made an earnest attempt at leaving his skull behind.

“Hang on!” Cranking on the controls, Poe nudged them out of the gravitationally-forced arc and into a more even trajectory. Finn coughed, filling his lungs now that gravity’s knee had lifted from his chest.

On the next exhalation, he held his breath again, counting the seconds. Five … ten … fifteen. “No visual,” he called over his shoulder.

“And nothing on the sensors.” Poe pounded his fist on a non-responsive console. “You going to be able to get us home?”

She sighed, and tore out a fistful of burnt-out wiring. “Limping all the way.”

“You’re a star, Rose.” Poe waited, but she didn’t answer. Chewie did, grumbling as he returned to the cockpit; Finn didn’t join him. Poe primed the computer for a proper transit calculation. “Setting a course for Yavin 4.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey is afraid that opening herself to the Force will let the dark side flow in and no longer has a Jedi-trained teacher to help her. Despite her deep misgivings, others think she should be in the field.

The Force was an ocean as big as the universe.

  
In its depths lurked strange and unknowable things, truths too large for one woman to grapple alone. The very foundations of the cosmos, penetrating to unreachable fathoms. But elsewhere, sun-warmed currents flowed, spangled with life in every size and shape imaginable. Beautiful, strange and familiar, and all of it contained within the endless permutations of the Force’s flow.

Rey could reach none of it.

She drew a deep breath in of Yavin 4’s damp, heavy air, and let it ebb slowly away. Her shadow shifted on the jungle floor beneath her as she rotated gently mid-meditation, occasionally sliding over BB-8’s curved surface.

“You can't find me here,” she whispered. “You can't find me here."

BB-8 chirped encouragingly. No one else answered. There was no one _to_ answer. If the Force was an ocean, Rey floated now in a tiny tide pool. No, not a tide pool: an inlet, where she could sense the greater sea just beyond her grasp. But she sensed someone else out there who stood guard over the seaward passage. Someone whose rage churned the shallow waters where she was stranded. If she opened herself up now, what if that let _him_ in?

Her breathing quickened. Sweat beaded her forehead, prickled her back beneath her shirt. She had slammed the door on him once. Surely she could do it again. She was strong. Stronger than him? Perhaps. Yes.

But what might flow inside first, if she opened the floodgates now?

A snap of tension in the Force. An unannounced presence, the whisper of boot on grass like a symphony shrilling in Rey’s meditation-sensitive hearing. The lightsaber waited at her hip. In one fluid motion she whirled herself to the ground, lighting the saber even as she whipped it in a broad vicious arc.

A jungle tree groaned, creaked, and gently toppled over where she’d cut through its ancient trunk. Behind it stood Maz Kanata, frozen mid-stride, her small clever hands folded gently in front of her.

“Maz!” Rey stepped out of her defensive posture, silencing the saber. “I—I’m sorry. I was practicing. The exercises that Leia showed me.”

When she went to replace the lightsaber on its clip at her side, Maz moved forward and stretched out one hand to stop her. “Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber,” she mused. Rey offered it to her, and she took it, tilting it this way and that to catch the meager light that reached the jungle floor. “It seems like only yesterday that this weapon first called out to you. I cannot speak for Skywalker but I know his daughter was proud to see how much you’ve learned about its nature and use.” She handed it back, laying it across Rey’s open palms. “Is everything all right, Rey?”

Despite its blazing heat of a moment before, the lightsaber’s hilt lay cool against Rey’s skin. The Force, impossibly distant and yet painfully close; the storm of borrowed anger and fear that rattled inside her whenever she let her guard down, even for a moment. How could she put these things into words? 

How could she tell the people depending on her that she, the Resistance’s bright-burning star of hope, felt so alone and hopeless?

“Yes. Yes.” She manufactured a smile. “I’m just—I wish I wasn’t doing this on my own.”

“Child.” Maz beckoned her to bend down, and cupped her face when she came within reach. “She would never have asked it of you, if she didn’t believe you up to the task.”

“I know.” Rey didn’t know that, but she sank all the effort she had left into believing it. “Wherever she is, she’s doing what needs to be done.”

“Yes.” Maz patted Rey’s cheek, and released her. “Now free that poor droid, and come along. The Falcon is back, and the debriefing is to start shortly.”

“Free the--?” Rey looked for BB-8 and gasped when she found him pinned beneath the fallen tree trunk. He burbled abashedly as she lifted the tree free with a flick of the Force, and hurried after Maz back toward the Resistance base.

* * *

Long before the Rebel Alliance had chosen the planet as the ground from which they would build the strength to destroy a Death Star, living beings had raised mighty stone monuments over the face of Yavin 4. Every morning as she walked out from the shadow of the Great Temple for training, and every evening when she returned again, Rey had to stop and marvel: not only at the majesty of that construction, but at the scope of what these old buildings had seen. The sight never grew old, no matter how many times she experienced it. She would always be knocked back off her busy tracks for a moment of wonder, of awe.

  
Except now, when the only sight that she could process was the billowing smoke pouring out of the Falcon—not to mention the mangled radar array. “Rose! What did you _do_?”

“What did I do?” Rose stopped on the Falcon’s landing ramp, hands on her hips. “What did _I_ do? Only held this wreck together while General Mayhem lightspeed-skipped it across half a dozen systems.”

  
“Three.” Poe brushed past Rose. “It was three systems, and if we--what happened to my _droid_?”

BB-8 tumbled up to Poe, who dropped to his knees to look over the damage. BB-8 beeped and Poe glared at Rey over his dome. “A ‘training accident’?”

  
“Mostly superficial damage,” Rey protested, and gestured at the Falcon. “Which is more than you can say! _Lightspeed skipping_?”

Poe shook his head, brushing paint flakes off BB-8. “I can’t believe you busted my droid.”

“I can’t believe you broke my ship!” Chewbacca paused, ducking his head down into the ramp, to complain. Rey winced. “Yes, I’m sorry. Our ship. _The_ ship. Finn!”

Finn had emerged from the Falcon last of all, jacket slung loosely over his shoulder. He gave Rey a weary smile and clapped his arms around her for a brief embrace. “Did he mention this all happened while he was lightspeed skipping across ten damn systems?”

“ _Three!_ ” Poe shoved to his feet. “Maybe you could have done better. But as long as you’re keeping yourself grounded, I guess we’ll never know.”

“Hey.” Finn put his hands up, ready to referee the fight that hadn’t yet broken all the way to the surface between them. “Let’s not get into this again now.” He looked over his shoulder at Rey. “If you have a second--I need to talk to you about--”

“We _all_ need to talk. Get everyone in the hangar. It’s time for a debriefing.” Poe held up both hands. “I mean, if they don’t have very important breathing exercises to deal with instead.”

“I’m not ready yet!” Rey pushed Finn’s arm out of her way. Her breath came fast and hot. Red-hot anger lurked just at the periphery of her vision, daring her to tumble head first into its depths. “My training--"

“This is a revolution, kid, on-the-job training is going to have to do.”

He had no idea what was at stake, what she might do if what willpower she possessed caved under the pressure of a supernova of hate and anger. “I’m not ready,” she repeated. “And I’m not a _kid_ , thanks. The Force is not a--a soldier under your command. It doesn’t come when you snap your fingers. You don’t. Know. What it’s like.”

He grimaced. “I know you’re the best we’ve got, and we need you in the field.” He broke past her, headed for the Temple. “But no one cares what I know.”

“You are a very difficult man!” Rey shouted at his back.

“You can say that again.” Finn shrugged apologetically, and trailed after Poe. “We’ll talk later?”

“Yes. Of course.” Rey turned to find Rose at her elbow, holding out a rumpled paper bag. “Oh--what’s this?”

“Yuandrian honey drops. Found them in the bazaar when we stopped for supplies in the Mercantile Ring.” Rose beamed as Rey nudged the bag open with one finger, releasing a pleasing, if cloying, aroma. “Try them!”

“I’ve never had one before,” Rey admitted. The honey drop rolled stickily between her fingers when she pulled it free.

“Well, yeah.” Rose snorted. “You’ve never had _anything_ before. Now come on, eat it and tell me how good it is while we walk. If we’re the last ones in, his mood’s only going to get worse.”

* * *

It didn’t feel right, without Leia there.

The Force didn’t let Rey read minds, not even when she was properly immersed in it as she longed to be now. But she could see the same thought written across many faces, the long shadow cast by that absence.

The Resistance’s surviving generals stood at the center of the crowd: Lando Calrissian, an old and dear friend of Leia’s pulled out of retirement by the distress call she’d sent while they’d been pinned down on Crait. Maz Kanata, seated atop a crate to make her visible to those at the back. And Poe, looking dour, shoulders high and arms folded across his chest.

He didn’t lower them when Lando ceded him the floor. He described the dangers he and the others had uncovered--the potential for the First Order to produce a fleet so massive it could assign a Star Destroyer to every known living system!--so dryly that he might have been reciting a shopping list. “We don’t know where this fleet is,” he finished. “We don’t even know that it’s real. But we know Ren thinks it is and we need to act accordingly.”

Maz tapped her chin thoughtfully with one finger. “Our shipyards cannot possibly hope to respond fast enough to such a threat.”

“Our shipyards are doing their best and it’s still not enough to replace what the First Order has already done to us.” Poe glanced at Finn, who was staring at the ground in front of his own boots. “We have a lead on Ren’s recent movements. If we can follow his tracks we might be able to find this fleet and destroy it before it’s deployed.” His mouth crimped. “Or at least get in a few good shots.”

“Even Star Destroyers can be vulnerable, docked in shipyards.” Lando cocked his head and pointed at Poe with one long finger. “Do you think you can find Ren?”

Maz interrupted before Poe could answer. “We may have little choice. Such a fleet could spell the end of all our plans. Our hopes.” She folded her hands together and turned--to Rey. “With the Force on your side, I believe you can succeed.”

“Me?” Rey hadn’t expected an assault to come from this angle. In Leia’s absence Maz had coached her, coaxed her, praised her tentative forays into new depths of the Force. Of course, Maz wasn’t Force-sensitive herself; but in her long years she had accumulated a great breadth of knowledge, and an even more all-encompassing wisdom. She might not understand just how badly Rey was foundering, but her assessments of Rey’s success and struggles were clear and candid: she knew Rey needed time to build her foundations anew in the Force. “I can’t. My training--"

“--is stagnant.” Maz slid down from her crate. The crowd parted around her as she approached Rey, not making her weave between their legs and tentacles. “I don’t know how to push you like she did. I’m not the teacher you need. But experience may be.”

“You can train on the Falcon.” That was Finn’s suggestion, kindly offered and kindly meant. It made Rey flinch anyway. “We’ll give you space to practice, or meditate, if you need. And we can help, too. If that would--” He stumbled, but finished anyway. “--uh, help.”

His eyes hung on her, heavy with need. He was so full of belief, of faith, and he wanted to pour it all into her.  
And part of Rey wanted him to. The rest of her understood that however much optimism he offered her, her fears would taint it, turn it into something sour and ugly. What would she be, with the weight of all those broken dreams cutting into her? Something like Kylo Ren? Something worse? She had to find her own strength first. Then, she could bolster it with his. 

With all of theirs, for he wasn’t the only one who had fixed her with that hope-heavy look. Rose offered hers up with an encouraging smile; Lando with a wink. Maz took her hand and squeezed it. The others, Lieutenant Connix and Snap Wexley and Commander D’acy. She couldn’t go. She couldn’t tell them why not. They trusted her. They needed her. They didn’t know how much she could hurt them, if she failed.

Only Poe looked at her from underneath a dubious shadow. She fixed on that, an anchor of skepticism amid the flood of expectation and certainty that threatened to wash her away.

“I’ll do it,” she said.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kylo Ren's leadership style leaves something to be desired.

The members of the First Order’s Supreme Council had developed an exceeding talent for not meeting the eyes of their commander.

  
It would have been easier, if he’d kept the mask. There were presentations to make, reports to deliver to him, of course. Throughout these, they maintained a deferential lowering of the gaze. They addressed the boardroom table with information about supply lines and staffing.

Not that he cared much for the particulars of what it took to keep a fleet like the First Order operational. In fact, incidental eye contact was most likely to strike a spark against the easy tinder of his boredom. He hated these meetings, but, they knew, he hated more even the slightest sense that his Command was, in fact, less than Supreme. He left it to them to make the minutiae of day-to-day decisions that he so disdained; they must never, however, let him feel that his judgment could be foregone. Where credit was due, he gave it with an open hand; where blame was to be doled out, it came on an iron fist.

Today it was General Quinn’s misfortune to deliver the latest data on the First Order’s recent … staffing quandary. A purported fleet of thousands of ships would require tens of thousands of personnel, and it had been left to Quinn to supervise the collection of the necessary warm bodies. “We’ve landed transports in eight minor systems and have additional units deployed to five more,” he said, indicating on a star chart the corresponding planets. “While we are currently behind goals, I have plans to continue to step up recruitment efforts over the next--”

“Recruitment.” Ren dragged the word out as if it were strangling him. 

Quinn’s eyes slid to General Hux. But Hux was carefully engrossed in the contemplation of his own cuticles, and did not acknowledge the desperate look. “Supreme Leader?”

Ren’s chair creaked when he stood, slowly, intentionally. He did not approach Quinn but moved slowly around the table, his shadow sliding over the other councilors’ faces, one by one. “Does it make you feel better, General, to dress the process up in euphemism?”

“I--the order has always maintained its ranks by recruiting among--”

“Kidnapping.” Ren fixed Quinn in his sights with a tilt of his head. “Precision is the foundation of a well-functioning military. Do you think, General, that you can be _precise_?”

Quinn cleared his throat. “We will continue to step up … kidnapping … efforts over the next weeks to achieve our goal numbers. Although they’re older than the First Order’s previous … detainees …” Ren’s mouth twisted into a self-satisfied smile. “They’re moderately responsive to psychic reconditioning. Imperfect, but better than nothing.”

A heady mix of terror and righteous indignation kept Quinn’s mouth moving. “Of course, even should these targets be reached, we still lack the actual _ships_ that you have suggested require our efforts to acquire personnel at such a prodigious rate? We are already in possession of sufficient force to crush the Resistance and nothing indicates this project will be anything more than a boondoggle like Starkiller--”

It was unclear to the other officers whether Quinn was silenced directly by the Supreme Leader’s Force-mediated grasp of his throat, or by the rib-shattering violence with which his entire body struck the ceiling, then the table. Either way, he remained where he fell, his head on the floor and his broken legs on the table-top. 

“Quite right.” General Hux moved his stylus out of the way of Quinn’s twitching boot. The others on the Council glanced sidelong at him, but quickly looked back straight ahead, or down at the table. He pasted an obsequious smile upon his face; Ren despised obsequiousness. Let him hate Hux as a cringing, servile toady--so long as it kept him from looking for other, more dangerous reasons to hate him. “Why stop, when total galactic control is within our grasp? Why aim for a fraction of the Empire’s former glory, when we are in a position to exceed it?”

“Supreme Leader.” That was a shimmering bluish face, projected in the center of the table; the watch officer from the flight deck. “We’ve arrived at Mustafar.”

“The home of your grandfather’s fortress.” Hux contrived to all but beam. “I except you shall have both a useful visit and an enjoyable one, Supreme Leader.”

  
Ren stood still another moment. Hux essayed to breathe normally; the tightness in his throat was only his imagination, surely, and not the touch of Ren’s mind. At last the Supreme Leader turned on one heel and strode out.

Hux released the last of the stale air in his lungs, and turned to the rest of the Council with the same crimped smile still stamped across his face. “Now then. Where were we?”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chewbacca has regrets; Finn and Rose stop putting off an uncomfortable conversation.

While the young people bustled around, packing up the Falcon for another sojourn into space--and slapping together a patchwork of repairs to deal with the artifacts of her previous interstellar voyage--Chewbacca lingered with the other veterans of the last galaxy-rending crisis. Saying goodbyes. He warbled his well-wishes to Lando, to Maz, but trailed off before he could finish. The intensity of his feelings spiked too high; the weight of what had already passed. This goodbye felt too much like a farewell, he muttered.

“It’s not farewell. It’s a see-you-later.” Lando lightly punched Chewie’s shoulder, which required a stretch of his arm. When Chewie only looked away, Lando’s genial expression folded in on itself. “I know you’re upset that she left. But you know she wouldn’t have gone if it wasn’t important. She’ll be back before you know it.”

“Perhaps,” Maz conceded sadly, from her perch atop a computer console. She took Chewie’s paw and stroked the fur on the back. “I know you wish you could have gone with her.”

Chewie snuffled, a wounded admission. His life debt, he explained, the last thing holding him to Han, and now to Leia. And she’d gone on without him, cutting that string free. He’d failed Han’s family time and time again.

As an uncle to a troubled child. As Han’s protector. And now, as Leia’s friend and companion.

“Failed them!” Maz scolded. “They all made their own choices. Han, and now Leia. And yes, young Ben as well. You kept them safe from many things. But, my friend, you could never have protected them from themselves _forever_.”

“Besides,” said Lando, a trace of that old glibness glinting through. “She knew these kids would need you more. You’ve got a sharp eye and a steady shot.”

“Look after them.” Maz patted his hand and let go. “And look after yourself. You are more deserving than you let yourself believe. And more needed, too.”

Chewbacca looked around, at the bustle of pilots mustering for drills, the rapid-fire conversations over star charts and datagrams. He’d been here before, so many years ago, in this very place. Everything looked so similar, as if he’d stepped back in time to relive the Battle of Yavin 4 all over again. And yet the absence of the dearest faces among the busy ranks cut him deeply. How could things change so much, he mused, and still stay so much the same?

Would another thirty years find him back here again, mourning this new generation of young people shepherded into his care, fighting yet another revenant version of the Empire?

* * *

“I think that’s it.” Finn came down the Falcon’s ramp, reading down the last of the inventory checklist in his hands. When he finished, he passed the data pad back to Lieutenant Connix. “Looks good. Should be enough to get us pretty far along Ren’s trail, I hope.”

  
“If there’s anything else you can think of …” Connix opened her hands, indicating the base in its entirety, as if he might look over her shoulder and pick out, say, this Y-wing, or that stockpile of rations.

She probably would have tried to pack them up, if he’d asked, strip the Y-wing to bolts and plates and squeeze it into the Falcon’s smuggling pits. He smiled. “We’re already taking all of the Resistance’s hopes with us. Doubt we’d have room for much more.”

Threepio clanked up beside Connix. “If I might be of any assistance, sir, on such a mission? I am, as you know, fluent in over--”

Finn put up a hand. “Thanks, Threepio. But I think we’ll be doing less talking and more sneaking this time out.”

“As you wish, sir. I only hope I may provide useful service in whatever small way I may here.”

“You sure you don’t want him?” Connix said wryly, and escorted Threepio down away from the ship.

Which left Finn alone on the ramp. He looked up into the Falcon, from which concerning clangs and rattles issued, and sighed. Then he squared his shoulders and marched back aboard. 

Rose was, as expected, neck-deep in the Falcon’s inner workings. “I think I’ve kludged together a workaround,” she said, without looking up, when Finn’s shadow fell over her workspace. “I borrowed--well, I _took_ \--the motivator out of an X-wing, which is obviously not enough to move a ship like this, but as part of a supplementary circuit with the existing unit it should be enough to keep her flying.” On her elbows, she pushed up out of the engine pit, scrabbled briefly with her feet against the side, and hauled herself to a seat on the side. “I’m not going with you.”

“I--what?” Finn had been bracing himself for a different conversation altogether. “We need you out there.”

“Rey knows as much as I do about keeping the Falcon tuned up.” Rose shrugged.

“Is this because …” Finn indicated himself, then her, and back again.

“Is it because things between us are super awkward?” A reluctant smile took over Rose’s face. “No, you dummy. I mean, it is. Awkward.” Her look grew distant. “But I think I can do more here. Tracking down Ren’s fleet isn’t enough. We need to be ready, when you do find it.” She leaned into him and shoved him with one arm. “Which you’d better do.”

“Ow! We will.” He found himself smiling too, but in the ensuing silence, that smile bled away. “I want you to know … it’s not because you’re not--it’s not that I don’t--”

Rose raised her eyebrows. “Are you _it’s not you, it’s me_ -ing me?”

“No!” Finn hesitated. “Well, yes. But it really is.”

“Finn--”

“No, listen. This whole time, I’ve been stumbling along with the Resistance, by luck or by chance. Escaping with Poe. Meeting Rey. Meeting you.” He spread his hands wide, an unconscious echo of Connix’s earlier gesture. “What’s my place in all this? Part of me feels like the same stormtrooper I always was. Always following someone else’s lead. After all this, I still don’t know who I really am. And how can I--how can _we_?--if I don’t know that.”

They sat together in silence: a companionable one this time, not an uncomfortable one begging to be broken.

“Well,” said Rose finally, and climbed to her feet. “I think you're a hero ten times over.” She set her hand on his shoulder, just for a moment, before heading out of the ship. “But it might be that you just don’t know yourself as well as I do.”

* * *

BB-8 warbled as he rolled about the Falcon, under everyone’s feet but Poe’s most of all. The little droid was thrilled to be going on an adventure again--not that he hadn’t been glad, he chirped to Rey, to be dispatched to Yavin 4 to keep her company while the others were out and about.

  
She smiled as she stowed her personal effects in the Falcon’s cabin. “Part of me is excited to be leaving too,” she told him. 

  
He rocked back and forth and squeaked inquisitively: only _part_?

She didn’t answer that directly. “It’ll be exciting, to see a bit more of the galaxy,” she said instead. She started walking to the cockpit, beckoning the droid to follow. “I’ve seen so little of it. But on this trip, I--oh.”

She stopped at the door of the cockpit. Poe was sitting in the pilot’s seat; a position Rey had occupied during her last travels on this ship. But of course, she had been absent for these last months’ adventures and the Falcon had hardly been flying _itself_ all that time.

“Just finishing up the rundown. We’ll be ready to leave …” Poe glanced up at her arrival, glanced back down at the console, and then realized the source of her consternation. He stood up halfway. “Oh--did you, uh, want to …?”

She did. But she let it go: the Jedi had counseled against attachments to the things of this world, against covetousness and pride. “No, not at all.” She squeezed past him to set herself down in the adjacent seat, and he settled back down. 

The uncomfortable exchange between them earlier still clotted the air; Rey wasn’t sure how to clear it now. She watched him work, the surety of his movements over the console. He was as comfortable in the pilot’s chair as she’d ever been. Jealousy was also not in the nature of the Jedi. She turned to look out over the yellow Yavin sunrise and dug for conversation. “You grew up here,” she said. “Is it hard to leave it behind again?” 

He paused, mid-checklist. “No,” he said finally. “It’s not that hard to leave.” He kept working, and kept talking too. “My parents are gone and I’ve been hauling around the galaxy for ten years now. It’s not really home anymore--home is people, not places. Still. It’s always good to come back.” He paused, scribbling down a note from the readout from the one of the console gages. “Do you ever miss Jakku?”

“No,” said Rey, and surprised herself with how sadly she said it.

Poe set down his pen. “Well,” he said. “There’s not many of us that call this our homeworld. I think we’d probably be able to share, if you’re looking to trade up.”

That thought sketched a smile onto her face, and he grinned back. Hers faded first. “That’s generous. But if I’m to--” She couldn’t bring herself to say _be a Jedi_ ; it felt like too much to claim for herself, and beyond what she had yet made herself worthy of. “If I’m to follow the path of the Jedi, I must belong to all worlds. And to none.”

“Okay. Sure. Yeah.” He tossed her a pencil and a weatherbeaten clipboard, a few remaining rundown tasks left to be completed. “But you could still _visit_.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kylo Ren pays a visit to his grandfather's one-time fortress, and receives an unexpected and unwelcome guest.

When Kylo Ren had been a child, his parents and his uncle had told him, in bits in pieces as well as in uncomfortable pauses and stumbling silences, his grandfather’s story. They, of course, had not been there as first-hand witnesses for a great deal of it; fragmented history data-files and old myths that perfused the atmosphere of the young New Republic had filled in the rest. 

Mustafar had figured into it from the start. The planet’s name had been told in whispers. A hellish place, whose lava-licked plains burned by day and night without the need for the light shed from the cold distant local star. That self-same magma, it was told, had scorched away the man Anakin Skywalker and left behind the blackened bones from which Darth Vader had been forged. In Ren’s dreams, it had burned beacon-bright, blood red and crackling with its own innate rage.

Ren’s shuttle touched down upon gray, ash-dusted rock. Here and there, black-trunked trees had forced their way up between the cracks in the rocky surface. Not small, stunted things: some must have been ten, twenty years old. At their greatest heights, their branches nearly brushed together, casting soothing shadows on the ground below. A forest, where once there had been only fire.

Ren hated it.

Another thing taken away from him. Another thing denied him. His parents had set him aside; his uncle would have killed him for a fool’s hope of peace; even that _nothing_ of a girl had spurned him, when he offered her a hand up toward an equal share of his power.

His uncle was beyond his revenge now. His parents … he’d already slammed that door shut. In time he would settle the score with Rey, but the opportunity had yet to arise. 

Here, though. Now, though.

When the ragged cultists-- _squatters_ \--came swarming out of the forest depths, waving blasters and chattering their will to protect their pathetic trees, he hated them too. His lightsaber was already in his hand; he ignited it, and met the reeking horde head-on.

The blade sang its disgust, and his own. In wide arcs, he separated cultists’ heads from their bodies, and parted the trunks of the trees in half. It made no difference to him, plant or person. It seemed little different to them, either, for the survivors keened their rage when one or the other fell.

The forest did not burn, when he was finished. But there was smoke, rising up from the smoldering ruins of broken bodies and branches. He put his back to it, and marched onward. Toward his grandfather’s fortress.  
At the castle’s door, he hesitated. Inside the heavy walls, he could feel the dark side of the Force pulsating. Beckoning him. Calling him homeward. 

Yet this place was something sacred to him. Something often dreamed of, but never before dared. In setting his foot upon the stones where Vader had so often walked, was he not in some small way desecrating it?

He stepped forward. The stones did not cry out, the walls did not fall, for this transgression. He kept moving.

Across the great hall, then, and up onto the dais from which Vader had once issued orders, discipline, death. At its back, he felt over the cold lifeless stones. 

He could not find what he was looking for--what he had been promised. Anger spiked, rising on a waiting plume from the dark energy that pervaded this place. He raised his fist.

No. He forced a slow exhalation, and removed his glove. Bare-handed, he tried again. This time he found the clever little concealed mechanism within the seamwork. Sharp; thirsty. He broke the flesh of his finger across it.

The long-hidden machinery hummed as it tasted his blood and the heritage that swam in it. “Skywalker,” it announced, in the tinny voice of antique droids. “Match sufficient. Welcome, Lord.”

“Give it to me,” he ordered, but the stone was already giving way. From the depths of the dais a mechanism emerged, its small doors parting on the treasure Ren sought. He reached in before the doors had finished opening, and seized the glowing octahedron within to hold it aloft in triumph. “The wayfinder,” he whispered.

The path that would lead him forward. To victory.

He was supposed to feel triumph. But he felt nothing. Casting a look over his shoulder at the empty room, he pulled the treasure inside his cloak. 

Aside from this one thing, he left the castle as he found it: shuttered and silent.

* * *

Back aboard his flagship, he gave the flight deck instructions on where to go. Then he retreated to his private quarters. There, he set the octahedron beside his grandfather’s helmet in its place of honor, and knelt before them both.

He meditated. In himself, he sought reverence; a communion across kindred generations. If not peace, then a temporary armistice. An amnesty from the storm that churned within him and rippled the Force wherever he sought its touch. 

He did not find it. His fingers curled into fists upon his knees and a familiar, hated adolescent whine came squeezing out of his throat. “It’s not fair,” he snarled. “You showed yourself to them. My mother. My uncle. Am I not more your blood than they ever were? Show yourself! Show yourself to me!”

He shot to his feet, and stumbled, capsizing the pedestal. The octahedron lay where it fell; the helmet rolled to his feet and stared up at him with its black empty eyes.

A glimmer of blue, out of the corner of his eye. With it, a glimmer of hope. He spun.

His uncle sat upon his bed, hands folded over his knee. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Perhaps you weren’t expecting guests.”

Without thought to move him, Ren whipped the helmet across the room at his uncle’s ghost. It passed through the ghost like so much air, rebounding against the wall behind and bouncing back to the floor. 

Luke glanced idly around, as if three pounds of twisted metal hadn’t just gone through him. “Smaller quarters than I would have expected, for a Supreme Leader. Plainer too. Is this bed even big enough for you? You’ve got your father’s height.”

The mention of his father struck the spark back into Ren. “I have nothing to say to you old man.”

“That’s all right.” Luke met his eyes with a stern look, the kind he might have given Ben as a young apprentice caught playing with his master’s lightsaber. “I don’t have a lot to say to you, either.”

“Why are you even here? I don’t know what you expect. That I’ll fall on the ground? Beg your forgiveness?” Ren’s lip curled. “I killed your students. I saw to the construction of Starkiller Base.”

Luke sighed. He looked so much older than the last time Ren had seen him, or rather, seen the false face he had projected to steal the First Order’s victory at Crait. No wonder he’d concealed his true appearance. The years had broken him. He was so much less now; less than himself. Less than Ren. “It’s not my forgiveness you want. And I can’t give you hers.”

How dare he mention _her_ now? He had no idea what it was he was trying to invoke. Love? Foolishness. Kylo Ren had severed whatever bonds had once bound them. There was no putting out the fires once the bridges had long since burned to ash. “Go away!” Ren roared, slashing through his uncle’s Force ghost with his fist.

When he looked up, he was alone once more.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey, Chewbacca, Finn, and Poe arrive at Hast Ovath and run into an old ... "friend"? The dark side tempts Rey.

The Falcon came out of hyperspace well clear of Hast Ovath and made a slow, cautious approach. Sensors showed no capital ships in orbit, nor skimming over the planet’s surface. Better safe than sorry, everyone agreed: the Falcon had a memorable profile, and low odds of surviving a repeat of her recent exploits.

Poe set a course into the atmosphere that steered them well clear of the planet’s clustered cities. The southern hemisphere was mostly gray-green ocean, and the Falcon skimmed close to the white-peaked waves, throwing up a fine spray in her wake.

“There’s so _much_.” 

Poe startled when Rey spoke from behind him. Last he knew, she’d been sitting on the ceiling in the crew quarters with BB-8 spinning around her in a gentle orbit. _Training_. She really ought to wait until she’d patched up his paint job from the last damage before she started using him as a juggling prop again. “So much what?”

“Water.” She dropped into the seat beside him. “I should be used to it, after Ahch-To. But I’m not. It still seems like a miracle.” A faint line appeared between her brows. “How can places like Jakku or Tattooine be so barren, while there’s so much water to be had here?”

“The galaxy's not fair. If it was, we'd be out of a job.” He nudged the Falcon to a slower speed as a shape began to coalesce up out of the flat, matte-green horizon. “Hold on to your seats, my friends. Next stop, the Hanging Cities.”

He had to smile a little at Rey’s gasp. “Not bad, huh?” He’d seen the cities before, and it was still a sight to behold, the arches spiral up from the sea, the manta-birds soaring on updrafts and banking gently beneath bridges, between spires. 

His smile ebbed away as the distance closed between the ship and the city. From far out, the city’s former glory shone through. Up close, the grime and grit and the sooty smoke belching out of factories obscured whatever beauty might have lingered. “There’s … something wrong here,” Rey said slowly, and he was disinclined to argue.

They found a place to leave the Falcon up the spires, anchored midair like a bewitched sailing ship of old. Out of sight of the city proper, it was still lofty enough not to be battered by the waves at high tide. Rey fussed like an old oody-hen over leaving her where she might be uncovered, but they all agreed that it would be best if BB-8 stayed behind to watch over things. With him aboard listening for their signal, the ship could be ready to move at a moment’s notice; besides, his round little body would have had a hell of a time navigating the city’s stomach-pitching ramps and gap-toothed bridges. 

“Don’t worry,” Rey told him, adjusting his antenna. She patted him when he burbled sadly. “We’ll be back before you know it.”

Finn looked out dubiously at the narrow chain bridge just out of reach of the bottom of the Falcon’s ramp. “I have a bad feeling about this,” he said, and looked over his shoulder at Rey, who waited just behind for him to step out into the city’s nauseating heights. “Rey … that thing I was trying to tell you earlier. Do you ever feel as if--”

“Let’s save the mushy talk for later, huh?” Poe elbowed between them and jumped across the last foot of space to land with a clatter on the nearest plank of the bridge. He turned back and held out his hand. “C’mon.”

“I wasn't--” Finn bit his tongue and grabbed Poe’s hand. “Fine. The sooner we’re out of this trapeze death city, the better.”

“Oh?” Rey leapt to the bridge and landed feather-light, without jangling a single chain. “I think it looks rather exciting.”

“Says the lady who can magic herself back onto a landing if she--” Poe bit off his words as Chewbacca, dubiously cloaked and hooded to disguise both height and hair, landed behind him. The whole platform bounced violently up and down. “--slips,” Poe finished, when he was fairly sure he was not in fact falling to his death.

Rey raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps if you’re lucky, I’ll _magic_ you back onto a landing too.” She brushed past him, toward a set of carved handholds that led around a spire and up into the city proper. Up there, laundry jerked on wind-tossed lines and distant voices echoed. “Follow me.”

* * *

They picked their way through the outskirts of the city, keeping to sheltered bridges and shadowed arches where they could. Fortunately, Rey observed, the place offered no shortage of shadows to cling to.

The city could not quite be described as _lifeless_ : in a coma, perhaps. A pair of bright eyes peered from behind a shuttered window; a boxy droid transferred packages from a cargo slip to a freight elevator. The X-wing-sized manta-birds looped in gentle arcs, visible beneath Rey’s feet as she crossed clattering bridges, or in fragments, between arcs of rock and the stodgy faces of buildings, as they passed outside the radius of the city. 

And of course there was the factory, near the city’s heights. From it, smoke belched and heavy machinery droned. A stormtrooper strolled along the perimeter once, forcing Rey and her friends into hiding. But the trooper wasn’t looking down and around for furtive movement in the city; no doubt he had grown accustomed to feeling at his ease in this silent, suffering place. After that, they moved a little faster, less cautiously, between dark alleys 

Beneath it all, something cruel pulsed. Its power churned the safe little harbor of the Force that she had made for herself, making that sea of safety feel more like a puddle. Warning Rey away?

Daring her to find it?

It didn’t matter what this entity wanted. Rey had to find it. It must have called to Kylo Ren in the same way, when he'd been here. And unlike Rey, he had no reason to avoid the siren song of the dark side. So she listened, and she followed.

At the back of her mind, she was dimly aware of the argument Finn and Poe were conducting on the question of whether it would be possible to jump from one of the city's platforms and land atop one of the manta-birds. “Even if it _is_ possible,” Finn said, “you’d just bounce right off its back.”

“Ah, you’re underestimating me. Reflexes like a manka cat, my friend.”

Rey cut in. “No one is jumping off _anything_ right now so the point is moot.”

“She’s no fun,” Poe said. “Rey, you’re no fun.” Chewbacca warbled his thoughts on the matter, and Poe scoffed. “Ahh, you’re only saying that because you’re too big to land on one.”

“Be quiet. Please.” Rey turned slowly, scanning over the lacework lines of the city. At the center, the arches smoothed out, rolling inward to a wide-mouthed crater. On the platforms above it, tattered banners flapped and strained against their strings. But no manta-birds played in the spinning gusts there. Small wonder they shied away from it, if their gentle animal minds were as dismayed at the unadulterated hatred that radiated from the place. “We need to get there.” 

When she turned to them, Finn was looking upcity at the munitions factory. “Right,” he said, catching her eye. “Let’s go scare up some intel.”

Chewie growled. He wasn’t any more interested in reconnaissance than Finn was. Rey touched his arm and looked to Finn. “Afterward--how many guards do you think are assigned to the factory? Surely not more than a dozen? Two? The four of us could _easily_ liberate it.”

Finn’s eyes lit up. “We could help these people.”

“Excuse me?” Poe stepped between them. “What these people need is a free galaxy. You can’t give that to them if you catch a blaster to the face.” 

Rey lifted her chin. “I don’t plan to get myself shot so easily as that.”

“So, what?” He threw his hands up. “You buy them ten minutes of freedom, then we jet out of here and a new garrison sets up shop--and locks things down on the locals even harder as retribution? You think they’ll thank you for that?”

“Ten minutes of freedom is better than none,” said Finn.

“No. No!” Poe shook his head. “I’m not gonna be the guy who gets the last Jedi killed on some crazy spur-of-the-moment mission.”

“This is not about who _you_ _are_.” Rey put her hand on his chest and moved him aside--not with the Force, but with the strength of twenty years’ scavenging. “This is about who _I_ _want to be_.”

She leapt across a hungry gap in the platform, landing with all the grace she could muster on a rocky outcropping. Finn followed, Chewie next, and when she started feeling her away along the side of the arch by dint of the age-smoothed handholds, Poe came too.

* * *

It was Poe who found the entrance into the cave--or rather, who pointed it out. “I’ve been here before,” he said, as they made their way toward the malevolent-looking crack in the rock. “Early on, before the Resistance was really the Resistance.”

Rey half-listened to him as she looked around the dank, cavernous space. The light from outside spilled only a little way in and broke over paving stones made uneven by the work of long lonely years. She couldn’t see the ceiling, only the pale white protuberances of—roots? Vines?—that penetrated down the middle of the room from top to bottom. The call of the dark side was louder than ever, but she still couldn’t detect any entity that could put out such a presence.

“I met contacts here a couple times,” Poe went on. “Swapped intel. Updated the lists of which systems were friendly and which ones weren’t safe anymore. That kind of thing.”

“I can see why you haven’t visited since.” Finn kicked a dented trooper helmet across the floor. “What a pit.”

A new voice rang out. “Maybe, but it’s _our_ pit.” A booted foot stopped the helmet mid-roll. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Rey’s lightsaber ignited as she brought it up, to warn as well as illuminate the stranger. The eerie blue offered little light. Only when Chewbacca clicked on an electric torch could Rey pick out the alien features of a full-face helmet … and a blaster pointed their way. “We don’t mean any harm.”

“ _Meaning_ isn’t the same as _not doing_.” The helmet tilted. Beneath the boot, the corroded tiles of the floor looked darker than shadow alone could explain. Best not to contemplate for too long what had left such stains. Had people died here over spice? Or were these marks much older? “Give me one good reason I shouldn’t blow your head off right now.”

“I only want to--” Rey began, then realized: the blaster was not aimed at _her_.

“Zorii? Is that you?” Poe stepped forward for a better look, only belatedly remembering to put his hands in the air when a leather glove creaked against the trigger. “I thought you were dead!”

“ _Because that’s what you left me for!_ ”

“Hang on!” Finn interrupted. “You know this person?” 

“She’s an old friend.” 

A blaster bolt screamed across the room. Rey leapt. She caught Zorii just above the knee with her boot. When Zorii fell, she tried to bring the blaster around. Rey followed her down, pinned her gun hand with one knee, and spun the lightsaber to bear. She held it just far enough from Zorii’s neck for her to feel the heat without being burned. When she glanced behind her, all three of her friends were still standing. The blaster bolt had seared a white-hot scar on the wall behind Poe. 

“A ‘friend’,” Zorii snapped, heedless of Rey’s weapon at her throat. “Try again.”

“Come on. That’s how it's going to be? After all we went through together?” The brightness in Poe’s voice had faded somewhat. “Zorii’s a spice runner. A contact, from those early days, like I was telling you.”

“A spice runner?” Rey echoed. Her nose wrinkled. _They were filthy junk traders who sold you off for drinking money._ She couldn't tell the difference between Kylo Ren's disdain and her own, anymore. Spice wasn’t liquor, but the two things braided themselves together in her mind and refused to be parted. “Why?” _Criminal scum_ , she thought, but the voice in her head was not her own, not entirely. She swallowed hard and stepped back, letting Zorii sit up. That didn’t silence the voice, which was laughing at her now. But it gave her some space. 

“Don’t sneer at me, child. I wasn’t always a spice runner.” Zorii brushed debris from her trousers and straightened her helmet where it had turned askew. She checked the pouch slung over her shoulder and the holster--empty now--and bags pinned to her belts. “When the First Order started to lock down systems, the more … conventional lines of work disappeared. Spice, or starve. Not much of a choice.”

“I can’t believe you’re still working out of this place,” Poe said, and looked around, as if she might be hiding others behind her back. “Where’s K4? You still working with Uffiz and his crew?”

Zorii laughed darkly. “K4 got caught and deactivated two years ago. As for your little _boyfriend_ , I can’t speak for his crew, but Uffiz signed on with the Hutt syndicates. Living fat and happy on Tattooine now.”

“Lucky bastard.” Poe offered Zorii his hand. She smacked it away, and stood under her own power. “Since you’re here, maybe you can help us with something. We--”

“Narcotics traffickers!” That was the helmet-crackled speech of a stormtrooper. Rey spun to face the entrance, where the muzzle of a blaster rifle protruded into the cave. “Lay down your weapons and surrender yourself for criminal prosecution.” 

Zorii snarled and lunged for Poe. “You son of a--”

Time around Rey slowed. She had her lightsaber up, she might be able to block the trooper’s--the _troopers_ ’? How many of them were out there?--fire, but she and her friends were so spread out, Chewbacca was directly in harm’s way, and her limbs moved so sluggishly, as if the air around her had cooled to a solid gel. 

_I can help you_ , murmured the voice in her head.

She answered without meaning to. The voice tapped into every darkness that lay dormant in her, tearing away the scabs of old, half-healed wounds. _I don’t trust you._

_As well you should not. But why do you disdain the dark side of the Force? Every coin has two sides. Do you also shun your own reflection in the mirror?_

_I don’t want your jealousy. Your anger. Your fear._

_Fear! A child fears the knife’s point and the fire’s bite. Is this evil?_ Again, the voice was laughing. _Fear protects us. Jealousy drives us to protect what is most precious._

In spite of herself, Rey’s eyes flicked to Finn, Chewie, Poe. They hadn't moved from where she last saw them. _You didn’t say anything about anger._

 _Anger is the flame that separates the living from the dead._ At glacial speeds, a blaster bolt kissed the rifle’s muzzle goodbye. _Do you hold their lives dearly, child? Do you fear for them?_

_Are you angry?_

Rey screamed and plunged headfirst into the dark and ice-cold sea of terror. The pale knot of vines overhead untangled and slammed together again across the space where the door had been. Daylight disappeared, and with it, the immediate danger.

Chewie loosed a bolt from his bowcaster that embedded itself in the luminescent flesh of the plant. Poe and Finn each had their blasters halfway from their holsters; Zorii looked up from where she’d thrown herself behind cover. “What the hell was _that_?” she demanded.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Resistance's efforts to keep up with the First Order's arms race aren't going well.

The thing about Charger-class cruisers was that if you didn’t give the engine array constant checkups, it would go to hell in just a few years.

The thing about Charger-class cruisers that dated back to Rebellion days was that they had _not_ been getting constant checkups, some of them for twenty-odd years.

The thing about Charger-class cruiser whose preventative care was twenty-odd years out of date was that the ventral coolant lines sometimes started to leak.

And the thing about leaking, twenty-year-old coolant was that it was highly, _highly_ flammable.

“I think that’s the worst of it!” Lieutenant Connix shouted, as she swept back and forth over the hangar bay with a water cannon. Little pockets of fire still nibbled at the floor here and there beneath the smoked-out husk of the cruiser, but in Rose’s estimation, Connix was right.

From behind Rose, General Calrissian coughed, and fished a piece of debris from the sleeve of Rose’s jumpsuit. “Might be we can still salvage the missiles from her. They’re shielded well enough to survive blaster fire.” He smiled crookedly, raising the corner of his mustache. “ _Regular_ fire should be fine.”

“I think so too. We could certainly use them.” She sighed, and pushed up her soggy sleeves, leaving streaks of damp soot across her palms. “I’m glad we’ve managed to salvage a couple of these old Rebel Alliance craft. But we’re just not getting the bang for our buck that we need.”

“Shipyards are already at capacity.” Calrissian stroked his mustache, shaking his head. “They can’t work any faster.” 

“No. They can't …” _What would Leia do now?_ she wondered. She sent the question out silently out into the universe, as if the Force were a broadband comm link system that Leia might hear, and answer. Silly. There was no way of knowing what Leia would have done.

She only knew what _she_ wanted to do. She turned to General Calrissian, hands on hips. “I’ve actually got something different in mind. And I’m going to need your help.”

“I’ve got a lot of tricks up my sleeve, young lady.” He stuck a finger in his cuff, showing her his wrist. “But sadly, no heavy battlecruisers.”

She exhaled slowly, and dredged up a smile. “That’s not exactly what I had in mind. I’m calling a meeting, all hands on deck.”

“Time spent talking might be time we’re wasting,” Calrissian reminded her. “Rey and the others are out there trying to buy us a shot at this fleet of the First Order’s. If we don’t have something to meet it with, head to head--”

“A meeting,” Rose reiterated, so firmly that he stepped back, blinking.

“A meeting,” he repeated, and gave her one of his trademark grins. “Yes, ma’am.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The First Order has a disagreement with Kylo Ren over his management of the fleet.

All across the lightless void, Darth Vader’s wayfinder had pulsed and shone in a new place of honor upon Ren’s flagship flight deck. Through unknown space it had guided them, to the world of Ren’s seeking. A planet, pale gray-blue, its opaque atmosphere flickering obscenely with an all-encompassing electrical storm. This was it: the place that would validate this mission and the responsibility placed on him as Supreme Leader of the First Order, of the entire galaxy.

“This is it, sir.” The navigation officer’s voice cracked. Fear radiated off her in suffocating waves. Not fear that this voyage had been in vain, nor of the potential that a well-ordered and tightly-reined galaxy was falling out of reach. No; she was afraid of disappointing him. Or rather, of how he might turn that disappointment outward upon her. All his staff moved more lightly around him, more smoothly, as if they feared what a sudden movement might provoke in him. “The planet you described. Exegol.”

“You’ve made a mistake.” His fist tightened in its glove and the woman gulped audibly. “This was the Emperor’s private base of operations. This is where he constructed a fleet to decimate any resistance that stood in his way. You must have interpreted the star charts wrong.”

“N-no, Supreme Leader, it’s quite clear, I only--” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m sorry, Supreme Leader. I must have generated some error converting the transcription to our ship’s system. If you’ll let me look them over again, sir, I--”

He spun on his heel to the scanner technician on the deck. “And you. Are you absolutely certain that our sensor array is functional? _Fully_ functional?” 

This one was a coward, refusing to own his own incompetence. Unlike the navigator, he seemed unfazed by the potential price of failure on Ren's watch. “Supreme Leader, I’m not responsible for the maintenance crews! I’m not _detecting_ any ships but if the array hasn’t been properly aligned or calibrated--”

Ren flicked him away from his console with the Force and swept his cape aside to plant one knee on the empty chair. The issue did not appear to be operator error. There simply was nothing there on the scanner.

“There’s something we’re not seeing from here.” The electrical storms. That must be it: the crackling ionosphere might prevent proper scanner readings from being collected. Ren didn't share his reasoning with the cowering scanner operator; let him marinate in his own incompetence a while longer. Ren shoved to a stand and turned. “Have a shuttle prepared for me. I’m going to the surface.”

“Yes, Supreme Leader,” blurted the navigator. The other, the scanner tech, only glared. He did not rise from the floor before the elevator doors slid shut in front of Ren’s face.

* * *

The First Order’s ships were too new; their elevators swept between decks too swiftly. Ren had had only enough time to ruminate on the scope of his failure, on how, at the very climax of their power, he had brought the First Order to a screeching halt and sent them across the galaxy to gawk at ghosts. His pulse thundered in his ears and where he gripped the elevator railing he left the imprints of his fingers. When the elevator chimed and the doors began to open, he could still feel the heat of shame and humiliation burning in his face and hear his own ragged breathing.

If the hangar bay technicians were wise, they would stay out of his way. He brushed through the doors as soon as they had opened wide enough to admit him--

A frisson of caution vibrated through the Force and down his spine: _no_.

Inertia worked against him. He was moving too fast to stop or step back before he left the shelter of the elevator. He pitched forward and to the side instead, halting his forward momentum against the elevator’s inner wall.

A volley of blaster bolts cratered the elevator door.

Sparks showered, smoldering where they struck hair or fabric. 

He was lying on top of his lightsaber. He forced it free and savored the cries of alarm from outside when its red glow reflected off the metal paneling.

Perhaps it was a good thing the trip had been too brief for the heat of his anger to cool.

A flex of his legs and he was on his feet again and moving. The smoke from the ruined elevator door disguised his passage for a moment, before the lightsaber emerged triumphantly from that acrid cover. In the hangar bay he could count perhaps two dozen stormtroopers and half that many officers arrayed against him: officers behind, of course. 

_Cowards._

The troopers opened fire again. By someone’s order, perhaps, but if so Ren couldn’t hear it. Under their own volition, if they were smart.

But it was too late for them to save themselves now.

Against the impenetrable armor of the Force, blaster bolts rebounded and tore back through the lines that had fired them. Officers, armorless, dropped first. Troopers next: some with unlucky bounces of bolts that caught them at the seams between protective plates; others hacked apart with ruthless efficiency by the strike of Ren’s lightsaber. 

More smoke saturated the hangar bay: some from smoldering, blaster-struck metal, some reeking of scorched plastic and seared flesh. Ren extinguished his saber and disappeared into the haze.

The stormtrooper captain called a retreat: too late. Echoes and wild blaster fire dissolved his words into so much static.

A lightsaber blazed up amid the smoke, only long enough to cut a broad arc. A scream cut short. A body struck the deck; its limbs a moment later.

Then, again, some several meters away. A crackle of red-stained kyber crystal, a blur of light. A heavy thump.

“Fall back!” the stormtrooper captain tried again. Visibility low, he had lost all sense of which way back now lay. His troopers were falling; half the officers who had ordered this uprising had already fled and the remainder were being eliminated, one by one, by the Supreme Leader they disdained. One brief crimson beacon. One more life extinguished. “Fall back! Establish a secondary firing position at the--”

He died on his feet, mid-command. He died quickly, a lightsaber through the neck. It wasn’t the death the man would have chosen, but all things considered, he might have done much worse.

Ren paused, breathing deeply, his lips pulled back from his teeth in a grimace. It should have brought him much pleasure to kill these people--they were meant to have served him, and they had stabbed him in the back. Yet this betrayal was _his_ failure as well as their own. More people turning their backs on him. Like his uncle. Like that faithless girl. It had hurt before. It hurt now.

But the keen vicious joy that had sang in his heart when he destroyed his uncle's would-be Jedi stayed silent now.

He crushed this internal dissonance; there was no time for introspection now. Stilling his body, his senses sent feelers out through the Force: searching for signs of life. He found the dead, in their great numbers, alongside the dying. Nothing left here that he should fear. Except--

A flicker of life and movement. A blaster bolt, too late for him to parry. He spun--

He was alive. Intact. The bolt glowed where it had struck an officer in the middle of her chest. The buttons on her uniform gleamed like tiny stars.

And behind her stood General Hux, blaster pistol still in hand. “Supreme Leader.” Hux strode through the swirling haze and snapped off a salute. “It appears I arrived just in time to be of some assistance.” 

Ren pulled himself to his full height to take Hux in. The man exuded pure, unadulterated smarm. He had merely exercised his duty, it was true, in protecting his Supreme Leader from harm. Like the others, he had sworn an oath.

But … Hux had also shown himself to be useful here. A strong leader did not punish success alongside failure. Underlings dealt with in this way developed learned helplessness, like skittish rats fearing a jolt of electricity that might come at any moment.

Or they manufactured a mutiny. Ren stepped over the steaming armor of the stormtrooper captain, and offered Hux his hand. “Thank you. Your service today will be remembered.”

Tolerating Hux’s thin-lipped smile cost Ren no small amount of patience. 


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey, Finn, Poe, and Chewie search for a way out of their predicament, while Zorii resigns herself to a dismal fate.

While Rey, Finn, Chewbacca, and Poe began combing over the walls and floor for another way out, Zorii parked herself in the middle of the floor with a broken pillar for a bench. From a hook on her belt, she removed a flask, and jammed its metal straw through the ventilation slot of her helmet. “This place has been my cache for years,” she muttered. “A _decade_. Normal people are smart enough to stay away. Then you idiots show up and suddenly I’ve got stormtroopers on my ass.”

Rey grimaced as her fingernail splintered where she’d tried to prise up a floor tile. “Stop complaining and help us look for a way out!” She pulled the communicator and tried one more time to raise the Falcon. “BB-8, can you hear me? We need help!” As with every time before, her only response was static. She closed her eyes, seeking the eye of the storm amid the rising sea of panic. She had brought them all here. They had trusted her. And now it looked as if they would pay for her mistake with their lives.

“Why bother?” Zorii raised her flask to the roots that still covered the door. Not for much longer: a bright glow shone through their translucent mass from the laser saw that a stormtrooper was using to slice a path clear. The saw’s angry roar grew louder as layer after layer of the roots fell away. “There’s only one way out of here, and that’s in handcuffs.” She drank again from the flask. “Or in pieces.”

Rey nudged the plant-mind. _I need more time. Send more vines down._

_I exist to serve. But to serve, I must exist._

_I demand that you help me!_

The plant-mind pushed her back, hard enough to make her stumble. _Is that anger of yours still sleeping? Will you not wake it and ride it to your safety?_

Finn had climbed to the heights of the room to feel about in the ceiling for the dark crevices from which the roots emerged. “If a _plant_ can grow through here, we should be able to dig!”

“The plant had thousands of years,” Rey pointed out. “We can’t afford to be so patient as that.” She pushed to her feet. “Poe, you’ve been here before. Isn’t there anything else?”

Poe had stopped directly in front of the door, frowning at the approaching light of the laser saw. His hand brushed the blaster on his hip. “Hm? Oh--no. Not that I ever heard of, anyway.”

“I can’t believe, after all this time, you’ve still managed to find a way to get me killed.” Zorii tipped back her flask to wring out the last drops of the faintly fuel-scented liquor inside. “I’ll say one thing about you, Dameron: you finish what you start.” She laughed. “Too bad all you ever start is _disasters_.”

Poe opened his mouth, but found nothing to say to that.

Chewbacca was spinning in slow circles, massive paws on his head, as if a panoramic view of the place might offer the necessary perspective. He bellowed his scorn for whoever had decided to set up a spice den in such a location.

“I know it’s a terrible place for a hideout but we didn’t exactly get to pick where we got pinned down so until we--” Rey stepped onto another section of the floor: one on which her foot echoed faintly. Hope blossomed, filling some of the hollowness that rang inside her. “Hey! There’s empty space under here somewhere!”

“Brilliant observation.” Zorii flung the empty flask at her. “When these caves were in use--by people before me and my crew, I mean--they were heated by the steam from the hot water vents beneath the city.”

Finn flung his hands up in the air. “And you didn’t think to mention this before?” 

“I beg your pardon, are wookiees stronger than I’ve been led to believe? These plates weigh a ton and they’re code-locked besides.” She flicked a hand at Rey. “Even Little Miss Magic Mind here couldn’t get them apart.”

“Rey?” Finn asked. He leapt down from his perch, moving toward her, but he evaporated from her awareness as she delved into concentration, sinking through the floor and into the Force, trying to separate the tile from the rock. _Why didn’t you tell me?_ her mind shrieked, sending nauseous ripples through her focus.

The roots only laughed. _See for yourself._

Sweat beaded her forehead, her upper lip. She sank to the floor, pressing her hands flat. She could see the ancient seams that ran beneath this chamber; she could feel the living rock where it ran all the way down to the seabed below, all the way up to the city above. She could do it. She was strong. She was _so_ strong. In her hands she held the lever that could move the world, that could crack these tiles in half, to fling her friends to safety on the other side. She could do it--

And she could see what would happen if she did. “No,” she panted, and dropped to her backside in the rubble and grime. Hope fled, caving her inward. She hunched over herself, struggling for breath. Finn reached down and gave her a hand, pulling her back to her feet. She swayed once, but stayed upright. “I can’t! The way they’re locked together--”

“Tearing them apart would destabilize this whole column,” Finn finished for her. Rey blinked, slightly taken aback, and confirmed his guess with an unsteady nod. “Doesn’t do us much good if we bring this whole place down on our heads. Doesn’t do them much good either.” He stabbed his thumb at the ceiling, above which scores of Hast Ovathi made their homes.

Zorii sniffed. “They had to be operated by computer. But the console is dead--has been, since before I ever started skimming spice under the First Order’s nose.”

Chewbacca had moved over beside the dead computer console. He grunted, and tapped questioningly on the keyboard. The screen hummed, and an image flickered to life on it. Below that, an encouraging request for input blinked.

“-- _the hell_?” Zorii shot upright, staggered, and stayed on her feet. “No! That’s not possible! We’ve tried plugging a dozen different kinds of battery into this--we tried jump-starting it with a salvaged speeder engine--”

“Well, it’s working now!” Finn pulled Rey to her feet. They both leaned over the screen while Chewie fiddled with the controls. Chewie groaned, shaking his head. “What?” Finn repeated. “It wants credentials?”

“Move.” Zorii shoved both Finn and Chewbacca aside. She unslung the pouch she wore strapped across one shoulder like a back holster and upended it on the console.

A tiny … _person_ , no bigger than Rey’s fist, tumbled out. As Rey, Finn, and Chewbacca gaped at it, it uncurled, stretched, and yawned. “Eku ba?” it asked, stroking its wispy mustache with one outsized hand.

Finn couldn’t help staring, rude as that might be. It took all sorts to make a galaxy. Still … “Has he been in here with us the entire time?”

“He sleeps a lot.” Zorii rapped the computer screen with her knuckles. “Babu. Can you trick this thing into giving us control?”

“Did you say Babu? Babu Frik?” Poe abandoned the door to join them. “The famous slicer? The guy who got into the Jargess Syndicate servers?” He rubbed his jaw. “Always thought he’d be taller.”

Babu sniffed disdainfully as he picked over the tiny tool set on his belt. “Esto Babu hin alo di,” he reproached Poe, and bent to pop the keyboard clear of its setting to squeeze down inside the console. 

“I don't care how _tall_ he is. How about _fast_?” Finn urged.

He could practically see Zorii’s sneer through her helmet. “He’s a _professional_.” 

“That’s not an answer. We don’t--”

At the doorway, sparks flew. Everyone ducked, but the saw hadn’t fully cleared the roots yet. They weren’t yet out of time, but the clock was certainly ticking faster now.

Poe drew his blaster and took a knee, steadying his aim at the door. “Get ready.”

Rey’s hand found her lightsaber. She drew it and stepped in front of Poe, ready to block the initial incoming fire. He shot her an annoyed glance and edged to the side. “I can keep us safe,” she informed him, annoyed herself now.

“I’m not a helpless little ewok cub here. I’ve been doing this a little bit longer than you have.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m not able to--”

The floor lurched beneath them. Rey staggered, keeping her feet, as the tile beneath her groaned and swiveled to one side; Poe threw himself sideways and rolled to a stand to keep from tumbling headfirst into the yawning maw that opened between them. Faintly foul-scented wind streamed up out of the vent, tossing Rey’s hair and wrinkling her nose. 

“Babu na oot!” Babu announced proudly, sticking his head out from behind a rust-loosened panel near the bottom of the console. He pointed to the screen, where a green cursor now blinked, awaiting input.

“You can congratulate yourself later!” Zorii snatched him up, along with the mass of circuitry he seemed to be embedded in, and lifted him to her pouch. “Let’s move!” 

“Wait!” Rey stared down into the pit. “The vent will stay open. There’s nothing to stop them following us.”

“Yeah?” Zorii slid over the side, landing lightly on a small ledge below. “Then we’d better beat them to our ships.” She dropped another few feet and skittered down a slight slope and around a curve out of sight.

“She’s right.” Finn ushered Chewie down first, then swung his legs over. “Our only shot is to beat them back to the Falcon.”

“Yes.” Rey managed to smile. Her hand had drifted to her lightsaber; she twitched it away and hoped he hadn’t noticed. “Keep moving! Clear the ledge!”

He dropped, almost losing his footing on the gradient. Chewie yowled at him to be more careful and led him ahead into the shadows.

Rey turned to Poe. There was so much to say and no time to say it: mistakes that could not now be redressed; small kindnesses that would never be thanked or repaid; the airless void of Leia’s absence that lay between them and refused to be bridged. She took a deep breath. “Someone has to stay.”

“I know.” 

“I’ll hold them off as long as I can—”

“Nah.” His elbow came out of nowhere, striking her chest and driving her backward. Shock sent her scrambling for a grasp on the Force, but gravity took over before instinct could. She flipped in midair, landing on her feet on the ledge. She staggered, but kept from tumbling over the edge and the rest of the way down the slope. If she had been more engaged in the Force, tuned in to the thoughts and feelings of those around her--but she hadn't been. “Poe!” 

“Keep them safe,” he said. “Catch you on the other side, I hope.” He reached for something out of her sight; she sputtered her anger and grabbed for a handhold to pull herself back up.

The vent doors slammed shut over her head.

* * *

“If I live through this,” Poe told the sealed floor tiles, “I’m never going to hear the end of it.”

Behind him, the laser saw shrieked. Time to re-evaluate his priority away from Rey and Finn’s potential retribution. He already had his blaster in his hand; he looked around for obvious cover.

One side of the console stood askew, where Babu had shoved it open to emerge. Poe wedged his foot inside and kicked it twice, knocking it free of its moorings. His boot had bent it enough that he could hold it up over the shoulder of his open hand, with one twisted ex-hinge serving as a makeshift handle. He didn’t know how many troopers were outside but he could hold off--three? Five?--with a shield in hand and a fully-charged blaster.

Or ... he could get _creative_.

When the laser saw bit through the last bit of root, showering him with woody pulp, he was ready. With a roar, he slammed shoulder-first into the root, sending it smashing backward through the doorway.

The trooper on the other side had not been anticipating this kind of reverse assault. Poe sent him flying off the side of the cliff, the still-lit saw spinning through the air after him. 

Poe nearly followed too, pinwheeling his free arm to catch his balance again. That gave the other stormtroopers a chance to bring their blaster rifles to bear. Poe brought his shield up between them, holding off the direct fire; other shots pinged off the rocks beside him and overhead, showering him with projectile shards. 

Oh: and there was a nice fat hole in the shield right in front of his face, still smoking where the laser saw had punctured clean through. Apparently whoever had built this place hadn’t had weapons-grade shielding capabilities in mind when they put together their computer system.

So he threw it at the closest trooper, knocking him over. That left ... well, too many troopers for him to count, so he didn’t try.

Instead he jumped. Chains clanked as he landed, tucked and rolling, on a platform three or four levels below where he’d started from. His body complained of the landing, but it held together and so did the platform, although both were swaying more now than they had been a moment before.

 _Keep moving._ He followed the platform along at a dead run, putting the natural curve of the rock arch between him and their line of fire. Still, he didn’t like ceding the higher ground to the troopers and the farther reach of their rifles compared to his blaster pistol. He craned his neck and picked out a path from roof to bridge to cargo station, leading upward. He could hide out on the roof a while and rest. For a little while. He had to figure out a way to get to the Falcon eventually. If he could do that without leading the stormtroopers straight to his friends. 

It would take them a while to catch him, as heavily armored as they were. But catch him they would, if he didn’t keep moving. 

So he kept moving.

* * *

“If he lives through this,” Rey said, with icy calm, “I’m going to kill him.”

Thrust out in front of her, the lightsaber shone a way forward through the tunnel's gloom. After an initial maze of passages that Rey suspected had led them into a new arch system entirely, the slope had begun to grow more level, the walls wider apart. The tracks of some ancient transport system could be seen; Rey remembered the stained floor they had left behind and tried not to imagine what might once have been ferried up and back.

Chewbacca trailed just behind her. With a growl, he offered his bitter agreement. Leia, he noted, never would have let him get away with it.

Rey’s lips compressed. “Well, I’m not her.” Chewie yowled, and her shoulders let go of some of their tension. “I know you’re not either. And we don’t have to be.” Did they? Was that something she was supposed to have picked up, along with a lightsaber and a collection of dry Jedi texts? And if so, how? Leia was the light and strength of the Resistance and Rey was weak and plagued with doubt.

The warm wind continued to steam past them as they walked. Already it had chapped her lips and raised a heavy sweat on her back; and frankly the smell had not improved as they went farther down. At least on Jakku the heat had the decency to be dry, practically sterile. This musty humidity was intolerable.

The temperature and conditions were, of course, merely a convenient estuary into which she could sink the overflow from the deeper veins of trouble running through her mind. A true Jedi would have been prepared, or reacted instinctively in time; a true friend would have known him better and expected such a stunt.

Finn elbowed her. “He’s all right. Let’s get through this before we plan any funerals. Okay?”

He sounded so certain. She wanted to believe him; more than believe, she wanted to stretch out through the Force and find Poe and confirm these words as truth. But there were dangerous things lurking in those dark waters, predators gliding elegantly just beneath the surface, and she feared which of them she might set loose. Which of them she might _become_. “All right,” she said simply, and essayed a smile. Her believing was impossible, but she could at least give him the relief of thinking she did.

He smiled back, but the smile quickly shifted into something new. “Rey, I’ve really been wanting to tell you--”

“Heads up!” Zorii barked. Her blaster snapped up, aiming past Rey, straight ahead into the dark where the tunnel leveled off. “We’re not alone.”

She was right. Rey could hear murmurs, the scrape of movement on the stone, as soft as the feet of desert rats in their sand lairs. But too big for that, Rey thought. She moved forward another step, then two. “Who’s there?”

A small face, moon pale with wide deep-set eyes, loomed up out of the darkness. Not human, but some similar species Rey couldn’t place. “It’s a Skywalker!” it said, in a child’s bright voice. “Look! She’s here to save us!”

“Empty hope based on false premises,” sighed Zorii. “Typical Resistance.”

Rey glared at her. “I’m not a--”

An adult’s hand appeared, snatching the child’s sleeve and forcing it behind a mass of ratty robes. “Please don’t harm him, great Skywalker,” this second person cried, “we are nothing, we are no one!”

This one _was_ a human, a grown man. Physical pain squeezed Rey’s chest, to see people cowering in fear before her. “We?” she echoed, and looked behind him.

Here beneath the once-great city was _another_ city in miniature: one that had never seen the heights of Hast Ovath’s glory, nor any sliver of its sun. There were more children, and a few other adults, and the wreckage of broken-down huts, houses cobbled together from all manner of discarded garbage. When Rey moved forward for a closer look, many of them winced, and shielded their eyes. 

“Oh--I’m sorry.” She turned it off, closing herself and her companions into dense darkness. After a moment, she registered faint iridescence rising up from the rock formations themselves. “It’s beautiful,” she breathed, which earned a burble of agreement from Babu Frik and a scoff from Zorii.

Finn was staring at the little ones, all size and shape, a dozen species of aliens as well as humans. “There’s so many,” he muttered. “Why are there so many kids?”

He was right; the adults were few and far between. The man who had spoken to Rey put a hand on the head of an inquisitive child who tried to push past him to see. “Their parents entrusted them to us. They would rather their children live in honest darkness than in the Empire’s chains.”

“But there will be no more chains,” said another adult, who huddled over two of the smallest ones. “Why else should she be here? The Skywalkers move through the galaxy again to break the Empire’s power.”

“It’s not the Empire,” Finn tried to explain. “And she’s not a--”

“We need to get back to our ships,” Zorii cut in. “What’s the fastest way out?” She shrugged at Finn’s affronted noise. “Let them think what they want, if it’s useful.”

The sooner they could get out of here, the sooner they could find Poe, before he--before he _anything_. “We don’t mean any to cause you trouble,” Rey assured the adult who had addressed her.

But the adult bowed. “Trouble is the way of the world. You could no more cause it than you could cause the sun to rise and the moons to set. Please, Skywalker. You and your companions will follow me.”

“After you, Skywalker.” Zorii mimed a shallow bow of her own. Cheeks burning, Rey followed behind the man. Finn did, too, walking backward until the dull glow was no longer enough to pick out the ramshackle village from its surrounding shadows.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kylo Ren reckons with the mutineers.

Mutiny was a cancer that ate fleets from the inside out.

Fire raged down the corridors of Ren’s capital ships; blasters screamed in a frenzied haze of directions. There were no simple battle lines here; he found factions within factions, an insidious web of attempts to remove him from power.

Every single one of them had been founded in two baseless assumptions: first, that their Supreme Leader could ever be supplanted. Kylo Ren, free of the chains that bound Jedi and Sith alike and thus the most powerful Force user in generations, could not be capsized by some haphazard assembly of senior officers and the confused stormtroopers upon which they’d enforced their will.

And secondly: that the prize to which he had led them was no prize at all.

The planet of Exegol, faintly blue and spinning with atmospheric storms, was an eyeball that fixed Ren in his gaze every time he passed beneath a window, as if it knew him and found him wanting. The judgment of all the minuscule minds in this damnable fleet had never stirred him in the slightest. This was different. The weight of history hung in the balance here. Not the dusty bones of a fallen Empire; he was here to make new history, to set the course of a new era of peace and power.

The prize waiting on Exegol would be worth it. It _must_ be. The arc of the future turned on this moment and Exegol itself was watching.

Yet he was aware too of smaller eyes, and brighter ones: the First Order’s new recruits, drinking in this death and destruction without even the distance that would have been afforded them by a stormtrooper’s mask. The red lightsaber’s dance reflected across their sweat-sheened faces, their wide and staring eyes. In life, yes; and sometimes after, too, for a spell before the bodies could be collected for vacuum burial.

Had Ren killed them by his own hand? He did not think so; he did not know. He did not sift carefully through the landfill of his memory to examine the question more closely.

He had killed children before. He could neither damage his soul more deeply, nor wash it truly clean. In the dark quiet moments where restlessness filled the space meant for rest, he waited for his uncle to come, and tell him so. But no one came for him. No one ever came.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey, Finn, Chewie, Zorii, and Poe try to escape from Hast Ovath.

Rey, Finn, Zorii, and Chewbacca emerged from the tunnel at its gaping mouth, not far above the level of the lapping waves. Their guide hung well back in the shadows, as if the spill of sunlight on the hem of his robe might scald him. “I will leave you here.” He smiled, and bowed again. 

“Please stop doing that,” Rey pleaded, tugging his sleeve to make him stand--not for the first time. These people had done so much, with so little, saved so many children from the First Order's hungry maw. What had she done so far, with all she’d been given? It should be her bowing to him, not the other way around.

But he only ignored her again. “I wish you safe journeys, great one, Force-master, Walker of the Sky. And I hope you will remember us here, when your scribes write this chapter of your story.” He gestured to Zorii and Finn.

“I am _not_ her--!” Zorii’s objection turned into a squawk when Finn stepped on her foot on his way past.

He leaned out from the tunnel opening to see where they could go next. “We need to get up high again if we want a shot at spotting him. If we--”

“ _There they are!_ ”

Blaster fire struck the water, boiling it into steam. A manta-bird coasting close to the water screeched its disapproval and flapped its wings to move higher.

“Stormtroopers!” Finn retreated within cover. From a secure position on a floating skiff several feet over Finn’s had, a squad had sighted them. “They must have been waiting to see where we’d come out.”

“Call your ship!” demanded Zorii.

Rey already had the communicator in hand. “BB-8, we need you!” She’d never been more relieved to hear his panicked burble.

“We’re near the waterline, on the southern side of the city. How soon can you get to us?”

BB-8 beeped shrilly: he would have the Falcon there in short order, he promised.

A blaster bolt struck just over their heads, pelting them with debris. Chewbacca dropped to one knee at the front of the cave, loosing several rounds from his bowcaster. There was a scream, and one trooper tumbled headfirst to splash into the wind-tossed water. More blaster fire drove Chewie back to stronger cover and he roared his frustration. “We just have to hold out a little while,” Finn shouted.

“Yes, you do.” Zorii tossed him a flippant salute as she strode past Chewbacca to the tunnel’s mouth. “Good luck.” And she stepped off the edge.

“Zorii!” Rey bit off a cry as a D9 Rigger swooped into sight from below. It turned to keep its asymmetrical wing oriented away from the line of fire; atop that wing, Zorii crawled to the safety of the little ship’s cockpit. On her shoulder, Rey could just make out Babu Frik, waving a cheery goodbye.

“I can’t believe she cut out on us!” Finn shouted. Chewbacca muttered a reply,to which Finn threw up his hands. “Fine, yes, I can _believe_ it, I’m just furious that she … Rey?” 

Rey didn’t hear him. She stretched out one leg, and followed Zorii out into thin air.

There was no ship waiting to catch her. She made her own landing, raising the seawater in a churning column to break her fall and lift her higher. Her lightsaber was already out, slicing an arc from the salt spray as she turned back a blaster volley. The water boiled, where it touched the blade, and where it touched her too, her anger converted into energy and heat and yet not lessened for its transubstantiation. 

_I don’t want this_ , she begged, and what a sorry thing to say, could she never yet be done lying to herself? She _did_ want it and when she tried to fling the curdled clot of emotion away and back out into the universe, it stayed in her orbit, refusing to be parted from her. 

Her feet struck rock. No time to think; body and mind peeled apart, leaving only a machine coiled and calibrated to react. She launched herself upward, running straight up the sheer arch from whose heights the troopers fired.

The troopers tried to fall back. Their rifles were unwieldy, never intended for close combat. But armor made them heavy, clumsy, too wide to fit side by side on a narrow staircase carved out from the rock.

Blaster rifles parted just as easily as water, when met with her lightsaber.

So did limbs from bodies.

Anger breathed hot down the back of her neck. They had threatened her friends. They had kept her from achieving her goal here.

They could have killed Chewie or Finn--they might _already_ have killed Poe--

They paid for it.

When instinct fled, when conscious thought returned, Rey stood, breathing raggedly, amid the wreckage she’d created. One dead stormtrooper: no, two. The rest had fled. Shards of weapons, shards of armor.

The lightsaber dropped from her hand, striking a spark where it hit the stone. It tumbled down a step and rocked there, silent and accusing.

* * *

Finn watched Rey rocket across the open water and run straight up a bare rock cliff before awareness overrode awe. Here was Rey, once again leaving him behind. On her way to great things, yes, things he would never have wanted to hold her back from.

And yet, here he was.

Well. He might be behind, but he wasn’t _alone_. He spun to Chewie. “We have to help her!” 

Chewbacca agreed, but also countered with a question: how? She’d run out of sight, though the sounds of lightsaber battle echoed to them even over the swell of waves and wind. Neither Finn nor Chewie were possessed of the kind of Force powers required to bridge such a gap.

There was, however, a small freight elevator not far outside the mouth of the tunnel. “Look!” Finn seized a handhold on the outside wall to haul himself around.

Up close, he realized that small was an understatement, as well as an utter irrelevance. The most important modifier he could apply to the elevator was _decrepit_. Sometime in its long years it had come unmoored from its original platform--possibly even dating back to a day when cargo had been unloaded from _sailing_ ships rather than starships! It now bounced lightly against the rocks at the end of its cable. When he reached with one hand to flip the ancient mechanism, it only made hollow clicking noises.

He gritted his teeth and grabbed hold of the rusty chain, giving it a good shake to test its soundness. “Start climbing, buddy,” he shouted, and pulled himself up an arm’s length. His boots slipped against the chain’s curved links, but he found purchase in the rust-addled metal so that he could boost himself up with his legs. “Come on!

Chewbacca growled, and grabbed the chain with one massive paw. Finn looked down. “What do you mean, 'hold on tight'?”

Chewie’s answer came in the form of a bowcaster bolt. It punched clean through the battered links below his own feet. The freight elevator plummeted; with a cry and a wookiee’s unmistakable bellow, Finn and Chewie shot skyward. 

Finn clung to the chain for dear life and threw his head back. The end of the elevator’s run was coming up fast--but their abrupt flight had carried them up and over more of the city. “Jump!” he shouted, and flung himself out.

He landed on a wide-sweeping, corrugated roof with a thump. After a bone-bruising bounce, he started tumbling backward. “No, no, no--”

Chewbacca dropped, several feet shy of where Finn had fallen. A wookiee’s extra weight was enough to punch clean through the saltwater-gnawed roof and Finn tumbled through the new hole right behind him. He groaned as he staggered to his feet on the cement-block floor, already feeling where new bruises arose, and looked up. 

Two hundred soot-streaked, staring faces surrounded him and Chewie. On all sides, machines hummed and thundered. A conveyor belt squalled its need for oiling as it turned, creaking to a stop as the factory’s work came to a dead stop. “Uh,” said Finn, “hello.”

“You there! Stop!” That was a stormtrooper’s helmet-muffled voice. Behind the workers, a half-dozen guards trained their weapons on Finn and Chewbacca. But these weren’t new-model blaster rifles, only outdated pistols. These troopers had been parked on Hast Ovath a long time, and provisioned in accordance with their backwater post.

“Drop your weapons and put your hands on your heads,” another trooper ordered, snapping Finn out of his reverie. Chewbacca snarled, and held his bowcaster tight.

Finn took a deep breath. 

There were moments where the universe seemed to pause around you, to give you the space to reckon with how you figured into it all. Where you had just enough degrees of freedom to pivot into a decision, and nowhere near enough information to guess where it would land.

They could shoot their way out. Back to Rey, find Poe, get to the Falcon. But all these people around--any of them could get hurt, if Finn and Chewie used their lives as a battlefield. 

His mind spoke to him in Zorii’s voice: _hey, hero, who cares? It’s not like_ you’ll _have to clean things up afterward._

Someone needed to clean things up.

It might as well start with him.

He took a step forward. “We’re from the Resistance,” he shouted. “We’re here to help you.”

All the air seemed to rush out of the room, leaving a perfect vacuum of sound. No one reacted. No one moved at all, even to breathe.

Then one worker scratched the silence with an audible gasp. The stormtroopers shattered it wide open by opening fire.  
Chewbacca leapt to the top of a moving conveyor belt, using its speed and his greater height to his advantage against the troopers. Finn jumped onto one of the machine stampers, elevating himself above the level of the crowd to keep them clear of the troopers’ line of fire and sheltering behind the mechanism that attached the stamper to the ceiling. He ducked to avoid a volley, then leaned around looking for a clean shot--

There was none to be had. The workers had swarmed the troopers and not a glimmer of white armor could be seen now. A single blaster bolt erupted from somewhere under the pile, knocking back a worker and cutting her final scream in half. But by the time Finn approached the front of the factory, the troopers were--well, there were no more troopers. 

The workers were busily stripping them, of weapons, of armor, of petty pocket money. Finn found himself staring down into two sets of glassy, empty eyes: the dead worker on his left side, one bloodied trooper on his right.

“There are more,” said one of the workers, a foreman perhaps, when he realized Finn was there. He stood up from between the bodies. “At the other factories. Extra details in all the cities right now, too.” He turned his head and spat. The gobbet landed on a dead stormtrooper’s face. “Collecting kids. Stomping out spicers and smugglers.”

“We know.” Finn looked to the door. Where was Rey, by now? Where was Poe? His fingers curled into fists; he forced them flat. “Any more stationed right here?”

“Two.” The foreman nodded. “But at this hour? They’re probably off smoking.”

Finn nodded. “What else do you need from us right now?”

“Need?” The foreman lifted a liberated blaster pistol to his hefty shoulder. “I think you already gave us a great deal of what we need, friend.” He smiled grimly. “Now we can _take_ the rest.”

* * *

Outside the factory’s main entrance, Finn spotted a tendril of smoke curling up from behind a narrow turret another level or so higher up in the city. That had to be Rey. 

It was a much easier journey navigating between platforms that had been built for the exact purpose of being navigated between. He and Chewie bounded across a bridge and up a chain-ladder, and found Rey alone in a little natural notch of the rock.

 _Sort of_ alone. A pair of bodies lay at her feet. The edges of their armor still faintly smoked.

“Finn …” Rey said. Her eyes shone, not with victory but with unshed tears.

Finn looked her over. As far as he could tell, she looked unhurt … but some things weren’t so easy told by a simple look. Her lightsaber had fallen; he stooped to pick it up and held it out to her. “You’ve got to take better care of this thing,” he admonished, attempting a joke; but she accepted it back as if it weighed a thousand pounds. “What happened?”

“Nothing just _happened_. It’s what I’ve done.” She nodded at the dead troopers. “I could have found some other way. I should have. A Jedi would have.” She turned away. “If I choose a path of peace, innocent people die. Civilians. My _friends_. If I choose violence, death follows me there too.” She knelt beside one of the bodies and laid trembling fingers on the ruined breastplate. “I don’t like who I am, when I look at myself now.” She looked up at Finn with haunted, hooded eyes. “But I think I would like myself less, if I let harm come to any of you in the name of the light.”

Chewbacca nudged Finn out of the way. His arm engulfed Rey’s shoulders as he gently scolded her.

“I know Luke destroyed the Death Star. And Jabba’s barge, and--I’ve heard the stories.” She shoved Chewbacca back. “That was different.”

“It’s not different,” Finn said. Rey looked at him, surprised, and he realized he’d surprised himself too. “Look. Killing people face to face might feel worse. But they’re still dead, in the end.” He took a deep, steadying breath. “Killing people might not be _right_. It _can’t_ be. But if it’s a choice between their lives, and the lives of the people who live here, the freedom and safety of the whole galaxy, then it’s--it’s not _good_. But it’s better.”

Rey shook her head. “Any one of them could have been you, in a different life.”

The truth in that throbbed, like a toothache he could never quite shake. Like a phantom limb. He muted the pain, temporarily, by crushing her into a hug. “I know. I got lucky. Thanks to you. And thanks to--”

She pulled away and scrambled to her feet, pointing out into the middle distance. “Is that _Poe_?”

* * *

Well, the bastards had found him again. 

They’d surprised him sneaking over the roof of what looked like an old Imperial-construction barracks, but which had proved, when riddled with blaster fire, to be filled with angry kornotts. “Get _off_!” Poe kicked the last of the squawking kornotts free of his leg and slid sideways down from the roof into the open yard of the abandoned garrison.

 _Too_ open. He ducked a shot that nearly took his head off, and ran across a bouncing suspension bridge. Another round clipped the bridge’s cable, snapping one side free and pitching the bridge sideways. 

The planks fell out from under Poe’s feet. He dropped, catching himself on a rocky ledge with a rib-crushing landing, and scrambled up.

When he paused for breath, he realized just how much of the city spread out at his feet. When had he gotten so high up again? No wonder he was winded.

One of the munitions factories was directly below him. Oddly, its smoke-belching chimneys had gone quiet, and--were those people on the roof? Poe stared as two of them struggled briefly with the flagpole to tear down the wind-tattered First Order flag that had flown. 

While he watched, tucking himself against the rock and evaluating his options, they ran the flag back up again. This time, they’d smeared a soot-black X over the First Order’s symbol.

Oh. He could guess where his friends were, now.

He should have been down there, helping them. Mission be damned.

“Poe!” 

He’d been half-listening for the whine of blaster fire at his back, but it was his own name that grabbed his attention. He stepped out of shelter, craning his neck for the source of that shout. “Rey!”

He didn’t hear the blaster bolt that clipped him from behind.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> BB-8's organics are VERY difficult to collect in a timely fashion.

There were moments where the universe seemed to pause around you, just long enough for you to fit a name to your mistakes but not long enough to undo them.

A spit of green light struck Poe in the back and spun him headfirst off the rock. Rey stretched out a hand, as if she could claw her way back through time, piece together the shattered seconds between now and then and do it differently, this time, do it right. Be smarter, be better, be less afraid and less alone and less--

\--just be _less_ , why did she have to be so _much_ all the time, to so many people--

He landed, in a heap, on the outstretched wings of a manta-bird.

The air rushed out of Rey’s lungs as if it had been her who’d fallen. The bird squawked and dropped several meters, but leveled out its altitude and pitched back into an easy soar … headed straight out to sea.

“Come back,” Rey gasped. “Come back!”

She snatched for the bird’s mind, trying to wrap her willpower around it like a bridle. The bird’s bright little thoughts were too slippery, though, too small, and they refused to be so restrained. “No!” Rey shouted after it.

“Rey.” Finn’s hand on her shoulder was a stone thrown into the dark bottomless pool of her despair. From it, ripples spread, disrupting the reflection of her worst self that she could not bear to confront. The self that Kylo Ren wanted her to be? The self whose control was so great that no problems or mistakes could slip between her fingers. Who could balance an entire galaxy in her hands, let alone the fragile lives of a few, without letting anything spill out of her control.

“Rey.” Finn called her back to herself. “You don’t have to do this alone. I’m here. I’m with you. Okay?”

Weasel words tried to crawl up out of her throat: _I can’t. I shouldn’t have come. I needed training._ “All right,” she whispered instead.

She reached again for the bird, which instinctively slid away from her touch. _Please_ , she whispered. This time she did not try loop the great weight of her insistence about its sturdy neck; she only held out her hand across the widening distance, and offered her own need, and through her, Finn’s. _Please come back to us._

The great wings stroked the line where the sky met the sea. Then they stretched wide. Banking around.

Bringing him back.

By the time the manta-bird alit at the top of the staircase above them, Poe was ready to slide off its back. He clutched one arm across his body with his other hand, but he kept his feet. 

“See,” he said, and leaned against the side of the staircase. “Told you I could make that jump.”

* * *

Organics did _not_ understand how pick-ups were supposed to work.

BB-8 could hardly see outside the ship from the pilot’s console, but plugged into the Falcon’s systems, he could ‘see’ through her input systems, and that was how he knew that his wonderful, deeply stupid organics had promptly abandoned the designated pick-up location to which they had summoned him.

No matter. The ship responded to his terse nudge. She picked up altitude and--yes, good, here were two of those difficult organics of his, Finn and Chewbacca (the latter of which was primarily one of R2’s and 3PO’s organics, technically, due to clear lines of provenance; but the boundaries on such things became rather inconveniently muddled in the presence of mitigating factors such as: which droids were co-located with the specified sentient entities, the accumulation of several hours of companionship, and of course the behaviors of the organics toward their droid counterparts which signaled their feelings regarding which droid they felt they belonged to, which certainly was not the be-all end-all of such matters but which ought to calculate in somewhere, and anyway any comprehensible sort of dichotomous categorization rapidly broke down under such conditions and in any case BB-8 was very partial to _all_ of these particular organics and would care for them accordingly even if per standard protocol they were not decisively his) and oh, where had those blasted organics gone to _now_?

The Falcon made a few lazy loops around a large building that appeared to be designated for manufacturing production of some kind. A First Order flag battered the breeze on the roof; perhaps BB-8 ought to fire upon this building? BB-8 checked his connection to the Falcon’s weapons systems, then paused. No, Finn and Chewbacca (and Poe and Rey?) might be inside.

Oh! Rey was _not_ inside. She was some short way across the city, standing by herself. She was the one who had called BB-8 originally. He brought the Falcon as close to her as it was able, hovering in the air some several dozen meters above her head. Her location, sheltered as it was, was not nearly as accessible as the factory grounds for boarding the Falcon. He didn’t think he could come to her without damaging the rock--and, likely in that process, Rey herself.

Perhaps he should return to the factory and she should meet him there? There seemed to be no imminent threat preventing such a thing. He burbled a message to her communicator, but she did not touch it, or respond. Ah--perhaps the communicator had incurred some damage in the city? Or perhaps _Rey_ had: the sort of damage that would prevent her from hearing the communicator, or activating it as needed to issue her response.

Or perhaps Finn and Chewbacca had the communicator now! They had emerged from the factory and raced across the grounds. They must have heard him.

(Where was Poe, he wondered? His other organics should have an idea about that, once he could contrive to get them on board …)

Except that Finn and Chewbacca did not look up at the Falcon as it spun down toward a touchdown on the factory grounds. Instead, they ran straight toward Rey, whom as BB-8 had already clearly indicated, was not in a practical retrieval location. He blatted rudely (after muting the communication line). 

Before he could attempt to raise them again, his systems registered aerial weapons fire: TIE fighters! Not close by, though they were within his intercept range. They were firing on a midclass Corellian freighter whose registration number BB-8 did not recognize. 

(Poe wouldn’t have boarded some _other_ droid’s ship, would he? No, of course not. Even if he did like ships quite a bit. It was BB-8’s job to handle retrieval, after all.)

Oh. Oh! His organics were signaling him manually! They must have finally remembered to let him do his job. He couldn’t fault them too much; _they_ hadn’t chosen to do have to do all their processing via messy wetware. And, oh, good, all four of them were there now, albeit in an excessively inconvenient place. 

They pointed down, shouting things he couldn’t hear through the Falcon’s cockpit. They really had broken the communicator, hadn’t they? No matter. He brought the Falcon below their location, as high up as he dared, and listened for them.  
Boots striking hull was the first thing he heard, followed shortly by an argument at top organic volume. Happily, he popped open the Falcon’s roof port to let them inside. It was good to have his organics home and things back to normal.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zorii's in trouble--everyone's still in trouble actually. Rey and Poe work together to get the Falcon out of danger.

“I’m fine!” Poe swatted at Finn’s attempts at assistance and lowered himself, one-handed, inside the Falcon with a grunt. “Help not required. See?”

“You are not ‘fine’!” Rey followed after him. “You’ve been shot, in case that slipped your attention?”

Over the shipwide radio, BB-8 chirped his alarm. “Did he say TIE fighters?” Finn asked. He jumped inside once Poe and Rey were clear, with Chewbacca right behind. The port snapped shut over their heads. “Because it sounded like he said TIE fighters.”

“He said TIE fighters.” Poe was already on his way to the cockpit, his bad arm still clamped against his side. “Everybody strap in. I want to get out of here before we have unwanted company.”

“You can’t mean to fly like that,” Rey objected.

He tried to crane neck to catch a glimpse of the blaster burn behind his shoulder, and only succeeded in wincing. He dropped into the pilot’s seat. “I’ve had worse.”

At the back of the cockpit, Finn rolled his eyes. “We all might end up with worse.” He pushed away, beckoning to Chewbacca. “Come on, Chewie, we’re on the guns.”

That left Rey and Poe alone in the cockpit. Her jaw was set; she obviously had something she wanted to say and he obviously didn’t want to hear it. He focused on the job at hand. “Setting a course straight the hell out of here,” Poe said, initiating the pre-jump rundown. “Calculating--course locked in. Now let’s blow this place before those TIEs notice we’re here.”

“Poe, wait.” Rey grabbed his wrist before he could throw the last lever to kick off their jump. She pointed to a holobeacon flashing red and orange on the screen in front of her. “That’s Zorii’s ship they’re shooting at.”

“That’s--what?” He pulled the release to vent the motivator before it blew under the pressure of an aborted jump. “Wait. She abandoned you back there?”

Rey’s hand was still on his arm. She pulled it back. “Not a decision I was delighted with but I don’t think she should _die_ over it!”

“I wasn’t suggesting--! Okay. Hold on.” With his good arm, Poe cranked the controls, cutting off the Falcon’s ascent and sending her diving seaward.

In the gunwell, Finn startled at the sight of the rapidly approaching water. “Are we hit?” Finn shouted, pushing back into his chair, bracing for impact. “And if so, by _what_?”

Rey said--something about taking heavy fire? “Still wondering from who!” he called over his shoulder. “Can someone please explain to me--whoa!”

Below him, a freighter cratered the surface of the sea, sending up plumes of water high enough to cascade over Finn’s gunwell. He swore and steadied his aim despite the dripping water that obscured his sights. Wreckage danced atop the waves, but the ship had kept its hull integrity, and it didn’t sink right away. A tiny figure climbed to the top, waving its arms … “Zorii,” Finn groaned.

The Falcon spun down to meet her just as green lightning sliced through the water alongside. Zorii ducked for cover, but Finn caught the little TIE in his crosshairs. “Not today,” he said, and lined up a perfect shot.

When the TIE struck the ocean, it sent a shock wave over Zorii’s ship, sweeping her overboard. She bobbed quickly to the surface, and Finn smiled not a little smugly as the Falcon’s ramp dropped down to meet her.

* * *

Poe breathed a sigh of relief once he heard Zorii banging around backship--but relief was short-lived. “We’ve got more incoming,” he shouted. “Hang on!” 

One-handed, he spun the yoke, throwing the Falcon through a crashing wave but throwing her clear of the line of fire of a triad of TIEs. Two more came screaming across from the opposite side, raking the Falcon with strafing fire. Rey held on to her seat as the Falcon bucked and rocked. “We need to lose them fast!”

“And here I was gonna try to lose them _slow_.” Poe juked, so that two streams of TIE blaster beams slashed the ocean surface instead of the Falcon’s hull. “But yeah, your idea’s good too.”

Zorii staggered into the back of the cockpit. “We can’t lose this many fighters over open sea.” The Falcon shuddered; she slung herself into a seat and buckled in tightly. “Go into the city and take some out against the rocks.”

“Innocent people will die if we do that,” objected Rey.

“Are we piloting by committee now? Always love that.” Poe clenched his teeth and banked hard with the controls. The Falcon dove fast and hard, her belly slapping the water. One of the TIEs tried to follow. Its wing sideswiped a larger wave, and unlike the much sturdier Falcon, it couldn’t recover. It skipped end over end and then sank beneath the surface without fanfare. 

Poe checked his sights. The other pilots weren’t so foolish as that first. They kept their altitude, sniping from above. Poe cut side to side, flipping the Falcon out of one line of fire, then another. It was top-notch flying, Rey could tell, and not just for someone flying one-handed. It just wasn't _enough_. On the ship’s console, warning lights bled, amber into red. “They’re hammering us!” he snarled. “We need more power to aft shields.”

“We _need_ a pilot with two hands.” She’d logged nearly as many hours behind the Falcon's controls as he had, and she had the Force in her corner--if she needed it. “Move over and let me fly!”

“I’ve got it covered.”

“It’s not worth our lives!” Rey threw a breaker, diverting power from dormant parts of the ship to the shields. Within a few minutes, the extra power would overheat the shield generator array, but it would buy them some time--it was just a matter of how they spent it. “Let me _do_ this!” she cried, at the same time Poe snarled, “Just let me _have_ this!”

In silence but for the growl of her engines, the Falcon flipped sideways, throwing them all against their restraints. Finn and Chewie caught one of their pursuers in their crosshairs and debris pocked the gray-green water where it struck.

Rey took a deep breath and held onto it, searching for balance: her own, the world’s. What was missing here?

Poe needed to be a pilot, _the_ pilot, one last string of identity tying him together. _She_ needed to save them all, keep them safe, keep herself safe too, for how could she hold back the darkness inside her without her friends as a beacon of light--?

What was missing?

Trust.

Stars sparkled at the edges of Rey’s vision. Slowly, with control, she released the breath she’d been holding.

“Drop,” she said.

“What?! If we go under the engines aren’t going to--”

“ _Just drop_.”

He glanced at her, a split second’s evaluating look. Then a quick scan of the horizon, the sky overhead, gauging positions. “Here it comes,” he said, and another volley hammered the Falcon.

The Falcon plummeted. For a moment Rey thought the ship really had been hit too hard to hold the air. But then she realized Poe had leaned into the controls, bringing the ship down. She struck the water nose-first and sank like a stone.

Light bled away as the Falcon took on depth. “Pull up!” Zorii demanded. “This is a spaceship, not a submarine!”

Belowdecks, Finn shouted in alarm as seawater swallowed up the Falcon. “What the hell--?” He felt a thrum run through the ship as the engines flickered, and died. For a moment the gun turret was cast into perfect darkness.

A resounding thud echoed, as that of a large furry head colliding with the ceiling; Chewbacca roared mournfully.

Finn unhooked his restraints and staggered to his feet. “Rey! Poe!” he shouted, as he fumbled his way out into the main body of the ship. “You alive up there?”

“For now. Hold tight, pal!”

A mechanical click echoed loudly from within the Falcon’s innards, and red emergency light broke over the passenger cabin. Finn sighed a moment’s temporary relief. “I’m holding.” He paused, cocking his head. Something else was clicking now …

No, not clicking. _Trickling_.

“We’re taking on water!” He spun, looking for the source. His boots nearly slipped in the fine sheen of water that had silently pooled on the floor. “Someone help me find the leak and patch it!”

In the cockpit, Zorii shot out of her seat. “How can this thing not be _airtight_?”

Poe shrugged, keeping his eyes on the blackness overhead. Every so often, a faint green glow stirred the water above. “Airtight’s not watertight.”

“Moona okk esdu,” Babu Frik commented wisely, from Zorii's shoulder. She grunted; her heels rang out on the deck as she strode out of the cockpit. 

The cockpit was quiet, with only the echoes of clangs and the occasional disconcerting splash and wookiee bellow from behind. Rey sent a tiny, questing tendril out into the Force and pulled it back quickly. “I think they’re gone,” she murmured, as if the TIE fighters might overhear her.

“Odds’re good they’ll bring a salvage ship with a diver droid after us, though. Let’s get out of here.” Poe keyed the engine’s re-ignition sequence. The Falcon trembled--and stayed dark.

In the passenger cabin, Babu Frik chattered excitedly from the ceiling over the holochess table. “He’s got it!” Finn shouted, and jumped from the bench to the table with a patching torch in hand. Babu climbed down his sleeve as he held the torch up and welded shut the leak between two gaping plates overhead. “We did it!” he exulted, and Babu patted him fondly on the ear as he clambered down to the ground.

“Not so fast.” Zorii held up a finger, and Finn paused to listen. Sure enough, water could still be heard, gently and inexorably draining into the Falcon from the enormous pressure of the sea all around. Chewie moaned and began fumbling along the roof, looking for more open wounds in the ship’s skin.

Zorii laughed darkly at the look on Finn’s face. “I don’t know where you’re from, kid. You and the girl are still too new and shiny. None of that Resistance scuff about you yet.” She reached out to jab him in the chest with one finger. “I just don’t want you to be surprised when we die down here.”

Finn knocked her hand aside before she could touch him. “I _do_ want you to be surprised when we don’t.” He shoved past her, pawning Babu off on her as he went. “What’ve you got for me, Chewie?”

Back in the cockpit, Poe was at the point of begging the ship to work again. “Come on, come on, _come on_!”

“The intake pipes are flooded,” Rey said calmly. “So long as we’re submerged, they’ll stay that way.”

“No kidding!” Poe slammed a fist against the recalcitrant console. “You’re the one who told me to take her under so I kinda figured you had a plan for that.”

“I do.” She inhaled again, seeking center; or if not that, at least a shelter from the storm. The Force pawed at her, darkness within as well as without. She sought a place of peace, a calm from the storm. “Be ready.”

“Be ready for--?”

The Falcon shuddered, this time unmotivated by any struggle from its engines. Poe grabbed for the controls, but they were still locked, unresponsive.

And yet sunlight spilled through the thinning waters overhead as the Falcon reached for the sky once more. “Are you _lifting_ us?” When he looked her way again, her brow shone with sweat in the emergency lights, and her eyes were distant and glazed. “You--” He clapped his mouth shut before he could shatter her crucial concentration.

The Falcon broke the surface with a lurch. Poe slammed the re-ignition sequence again. This time the engines sputtered, but failed to catch. “No, no, no,” he pleaded, as she tilted dizzyingly back down toward the water, Rey’s strength fighting tireless gravity.

There was no proximity alarm to beep, but Chewie bellowed an alert from below: the TIEs were still in line of sight, and they were turning back now.

“Change the injection fraction,” Rey gasped. Her fingers clawed the arms of her chair, cutting into the sharp line beneath; the pain was a distant, insistent annoyance but it was also an anchor that held her in her body while the Force churned around her. “Four percent more rhydonium to--”

“--burn hotter and flush the lines!” He ran his good hand over the console, nudging levers, flipping switches. “Let’s do this,” he told the Falcon, and this time it sounded like an order.

He gunned the engines and they roared to life. The Falcon flung herself skyward, leaving a trail of steam in her wake and the TIE fighters too far behind to catch up. Rey’s heart beat faster as the ship cut clear of the atmosphere altogether--Poe’s enthusiasm was contagious. He whooped as he urged the ship ever higher, leaving Hast Ovath behind, free of pursuit by any First Order ship. “I could just about kiss you right now!” he cried in triumph.

Both he and Rey went very still, absorbing this, processing it, and finding it likely true.

Behind them, in the back of the cockpit, Finn fumbled the patching torch and dropped it with a resounding clang onto the deck.

Rey developed a sudden and intense interest in the consoles in front of her. Finn cleared his throat, leaning against the ceiling with one hand. “The, uh. All the leaks are patched. The Falcon’s spaceworthy.”

“Good!” Poe said. He opened a switch and promptly closed it again. “Excellent. Thank you. Good.”

Finn’s lips twitched. “You said ‘good’ already,” he pointed out.

“I’ll just come check those patches,” Rey said. She unbuckled and squeezed out of the cockpit under Finn’s outstretched arm. “To be sure.”

The cockpit was silent again in her wake. Finn tucked a smile behind his hand and chucked himself into her empty seat. “Smooth flying,” he commented, which only received an irritated headshake from Poe.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kylo Ren finds what he needs--or at least, what he believes he does.

A black boot landed with a ring upon flat, gray rock.

On its surface, the planet Exegol offered very little to look at. Endless plains of granite. No sign of water; no sign of life. A man might go mad in such a landscape, with so little to offer the imagination.

Appearances could be deceiving.

Kylo Ren ignited his lightsaber as he strode across the rocky plain. It offered the illumination that this world’s sickly star did not; most of its visible light did not make it across the ionic storms churning the atmosphere. Behind him, an empty gunship cast no discernible shadow. Farther back, the remnants of one of his capital ships could be seen, a new mountain range to decorate this flat-blasted landscape. A monument to the mutiny that had failed to topple the Supreme Leader. A testament to Kylo Ren’s willpower.

More than that: a promise, brought to fruition through faith in the dark side of the Force.

A small assemblage of self-sworn ‘loyal’ officers hurried along in Ren’s wake, each and every one of them ashen and sweating. Their eyes darted, now and again, to the glittering cascade of Star Destroyers hung in the air over their heads. A sanity-defying quantity of ships, ghosting silently and unlit in the air above. Likely none of these men and women had expected to survive their gunship sojourn, and greedy anticipation for this new-found trove of firepower had not yet overtaken that shock. While Ren’s every sense yearned to reach forward, to strip away the secrets of this place, their desires strained in the opposite direction. They had not wanted to come; they did not want to be here now. 

They did not want to have been _wrong_.

Where Ren’s boots struck the rock, powder-fine dust spewed. Electricity discharged in bursts of blue, which bled into purple where they met the lightsaber’s red glare. Like miniature stars. Like echoes of a mighty fleet.

A hundred hundred Star Destroyers hung in the sky over Exegol, on the cusp of a held breath. Hiding inside the tangle of the ion storms. Awaiting the word to free them.

Awaiting _his_ word.

He didn’t know how they had been shielded from his flagship's scrutiny. But he didn’t have to understand. He knew that they were safe, and that they were his; nothing would tear them from his grasp now.

He and his officers didn’t have to walk long. Not far from the gunship’s landing point, an open wound gaped in the surface of the planet. Ren stopped beside it, waiting impatiently and imperiously as his officers caught up.  
“Supreme Leader?” asked one uncertainly. “What is the purpose of this excursion? There appears to be nothing down here worth--”

All five officers jumped back as a platform broke through the gap to the surface. All five, that was, minus Hux. He had been watching Ren, not the ground, with a small, rodent-like smile. “Let us follow the path our Supreme Leader has set toward our final victory,” he said, with a sharp salute, and led the way onto the platform.

Ren was the last to step aboard, and he noticed the anxiety radiating off the officers as they waited for him to join them. Their relief was palpable; he could have measured the new slack in their shoulders in inches. 

They had no reason to bask in such reassurance. But they would learn that soon enough.

* * *

They passed down through deep layers of rock, shot through with fine veins of glossy black, down to a narrow hallway carved from the bare stone itself.

This underlevel of Exegol glowed as if lit from within, a grayish and sourceless light that defied any mind that sought to confine it to the limits of a more predictable physics. Ren swept ahead while his officers stumbled along, not daring to ask one another the questions that gnawed at them.

After a brief downward run, the hallway opened up into hungry darkness. The ceiling sloped sharply away, into a room whose scope could not be guessed at, though the scuffling cadre of officers who hesitated at the threshold certainly might have tried. 

Ren did not pause. He strolled out expectantly and let the darkness swallow him up. 

“Supreme Leader!” cried one of the officers--the highest-ranked of his surviving generals, Ren thought. Footsteps scuffled behind him, following him into the dark. 

A crunch. The footsteps stopped. A ragged breath that built into a scream. The creak of ancient--metal?--and a wet, organic squelch. The scream abruptly ceased.

The darkness in the room pulsed, and then condensed. The same vague, diffuse light filled the cavernous room, spilling over the ragged line of an unfinished engine, the pitted plating of a Star Destroyer’s central column.  
The darkness had collected into a sinuous tendril that writhed around the room, bound by no apparent connection to gravity. One end oriented toward Ren, and the formless cloud manifested … a face. Featureless, two empty staring eyes and a motionless mouth. But a face nonetheless.

“This one was not of the Emperor’s line.” Ren glanced down at where dark stains and a few scraps of fabric mottled the otherwise indistinguishable gray floor. “Neither are you. But oh, you move through the Force as he did.”

Ren’s lips twisted. “Who are you?” Or _what_ , he might have asked, though he sensed that treating this entity with respect might be the most sensible course.

“We are the Builder.” A hum of pleasure ran the length of the Builder’s being. “We were less, once. And more. And yet always it was our pleasure to serve the Emperor. Will we serve you, too, the Risen Skywalker, the scion of the seneschal?”

 _Scion._ The word stirred a tangled sense of pride in Ren: to be acknowledged, honored even, as being in some way of Vader, from Vader. Vader’s. It wiped out entirely the pain of hearing his uncle’s name attached to him. Vader had been a Skywalker first, he reminded himself. “I came to claim my fleet.”

The entity twitched, and coiled around him. Where it brushed past him, he felt nothing save a bottomless, burning hunger. “We give it gladly, on the condition that it is used to honor him who gave us purpose.”

Ren’s vision of empire would put Palpatine’s paltry holdings to shame. There would be no rebellion, no resistance, nothing but perfect peace when he was finished. Still, he dissembled for now. “It will be done.” The words were not strong enough; he reinforced them. “I will do this.”

“Then we honor you as we did him.” The face dipped, as if in imitation of a bow. “But the fleet needs living beings to stir it to life. We can make many things, but we cannot make this.”

“They will be staffed.” Ren lifted his chin. The Builder’s hunger had subsided somewhat, but it still throbbed beneath the surface of the buzzing cloud of--nanotechnology? What had the Emperor brought into being here? “I accept your service with pride. Please--”

He looked over his shoulder and beckoned to his officers. They stepped forward, hesitant. But obedient. He smiled, and turned back to the entity. “Accept this sacrifice of carbon and iron.”

A tremor ran up and down the Builder as the officers processed that. Then the Builder exploded outward, clotting around each thrashing body.

“No!” Hux shrieked, clawing at the invisible threads that tore at the skin of his hands, his face. “I saved you! I was loyal, I was always—”

Was this--guilt? _Shame_? Ren believed himself long since purged himself of those particular weaknesses. Still ... “Wait,” Ren said. He flicked his will out across the Force and the Builder opened an envelope of space around Hux. 

The general gasped and choked, pulling himself to a sit, unable to stand. Wildly he looked around for a glimpse of salvation. The only sight to be seen was the rapid deconstruction of his fellow officers. Ren knelt before him and looked him in the eye, filling his vision in their place. “All right. Tell me why I should spare you.”

“Why you should--” Hux’s face flushed, then churned to a mottled white-and-pink. “I could--I would be--” He floundered, then seized upon a sturdier idea. “Vader! Vader was the Emperor’s enforcer. I could be yours. I could be your Vader.” And he stared up at Ren, his eyes bloodshot and watering, his nose running. 

The very idea repulsed Ren. This man dared to name himself and Vader in the same breath! This man had the temerity to drape himself in the cloak of Vader’s power and strength!

And yet. And yet. Why must there always be an _and yet_? Hux had saved him, in the hangar bay. He had paid his dues in loyalty then, unlike these others, whose subversive ties to mutiny and fomented treason Ren had ferreted out from ‘private’ communiques and fearful underlings. He might yet be of some use.

“Stand,” Ren ordered, and Hux tottered to his feet as if he realized his life depended on it. Ren offered a hand, and Hux seized it, grasping Ren’s fingers through his glove to hold himself upright where his trembling legs could not. “You see,” Ren averred, sweeping his arm to take in the Builder, the room, the hooded acolytes hovering at the margins. “Now we cannot fail.”

He turned back to the Builder. “What you are … it’s like you are the dark side made physical. I want to understand how that can be.”

“Scion of the seneschal.” The Builder’s outline pulsed with pleasure. “We can show you.”


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose definitely does _not_ give a speech.

Rose stood on a platform in the shadow of the broken-down husk of an old-model bomber, and looked down at the sea of anxious, expectant faces.

General Organa should have been standing here.

Or Poe, at least, or Rey. General Calrissian. She’d rehearsed her ideas with him and Maz, but both of them had demurred when she offered them the chance to present the plan to the Resistance at large. This was the moment for big, bold speeches, for a call to action that would stir hearts and raise spirits. That called for someone worthy. Someone who commanded respect. Instead, the Resistance was stuck with a mousy engineer with a fear of public speaking.

“I called everyone together,” she said, “to tell you how we’re going to win this fight.”

The conversations among the others on the floor didn't stop. She hadn't actually spoken loudly enough for anyone to take notice. Beside her, R2-D2 wheeled and burbled his encouragement. She cleared her throat. “I called you all here,” she said again, trying to force a little more volume out of herself--to no avail.

R2 chirped something else, to 3PO this time, not her. “Oh!” The protocol droid jerked to attention. “Yes. Yes, of course I would be happy to be of some assistance to Commander Tico, if I may.” His gyros squealed as he turned from her to R2 and back again. “But as nearly everyone assembled here already speaks Basic, I don’t see how my services in translation and protocol are of any--”

R2 made a noise that, Rose believed, roughly equated to a word that would have gotten her and Paige’s mouths scrubbed out with soap when they were kids. Her hand darted to her necklace, then fell away again. Paige would have been better at this, too.

3PO was arguing with R2 now. “My functionality does not include an amplification suite. If you want me to—well, I beg your pardon!--what? The fate of the Resistance? I’m sure I’m much too unimportant to have such a weight resting upon my--well! If that’s how you’re going to be, fine. It’s _your_ power source.”

R2 beeped brightly, and extended a plug from a hidden compartment. When 3PO bent low, it socked neatly into a portal in his torso, and R2 followed along as 3PO shuffled to the edge of the dais.

“Attention, gentlebeings!” 3PO’s voice blasted out over the Resistance base. No one failed to hear him speak; several people in fact cringed at the volume. “Commander Rose Tico has asked us to gather here today to address us regarding the future of the Resistance. Please address to her your polite attention at this time. Now _stop_ , R2, my vocal modulator is starting to overheat.”

He and R2 withdrew and Rose stepped forward in their place. “I know you’re all expecting a big speech,” she said. Everything had gone quiet now, and though her voice wasn’t much louder than it had been before, it carried across the ancient stones of the old base. “I know you deserve one. But I don’t have beautiful words for you today. I don’t know what to say, to give you hope. I’m not much of a speaker.” A murmur rolled across the crowd, and Rose’s face grew hot. “I’m a mechanic at heart, I guess. So what I have for you is … a diagram, let’s say. A plan for how to move forward.”

She raised her arm, gesturing at the hangar. “You’ve all done amazing work; here, and those of you who have served out in the shipyards too. I wish that _that_ was the linchpin that was going to turn this war around. But ... it’s not. We need more firepower and we don’t have the time, or the resources, to make it ourselves.”

“We asked the galaxy for help before.” A pilot near the front raised her voice, making Rose hear her, and the rest of the gathering as well. “They turned their backs on us!”

“We asked the _galaxy_ for help,” Rose repeated, seizing on those words. “This time, we’re going to ask _people_.”  
She held out her hands to the crowd, begging their attention, begging them to hear her out. “I’m sending some of you to the Rim. Others, to the Galactic Center. Coruscant. Corellia. The places you’re from. The worlds you know. Some of them still have local fleets; there are privateer patrols and smugglers with gunships. If we can get them to join us--”

“A handful of antique cruisers is not going to defeat the First Order!” a technician objected.

“No, it’s not.” Rose squared her shoulders. “ _You_ are. We are. And we’re going to have help, and not just from the Rim.” She fumbled a remote from her pocket and pressed a button, bringing a star map to life in the air overhead, overlaid with a technical schematic. She was a mechanic, after all. 

_Alderaan._ The word seemed to whisper across the room without any lips moving. _That’s the Alderaan system. That’s the flotilla._

“Alderaan was the Death Star’s first casualty. Its people have lost more than almost anyone.” Rose’s chin lifted. “If we can get _them_ to come to battle, if they can still lift their heads and fight--then anyone can.” She turned slowly, taking in the room. “We have a plan. We just need our team in the field to figure out where we need to go, to make this last stand. And when they do? We’ll be ready. With a fleet worthy of this, of you.” Her fingers closed over her heart, where her necklace lay warm against her skin. “Of everyone we’ve lost. And everyone we can still save.”

It started with General Calrissian, who put his fingers to his lips and loosed a shrill whistle. Then the cheer broke across the room in waves: ragged, and tenuous, and quickly over, leaving Rose dizzy and breathless. “You can get your assignments from 3PO,” she shouted, into the chaos. “And may the Force be with you!”

General Calrissian took her arm as she hopped down from the platform. “And here I thought you said you didn’t know how to give speeches.” 

“That’s not what that was,” she protested. “That was just--a few things I had to say!”

“Mmm, well.” He tapped the side of his nose. “Better than a lot of speeches I’ve had to sit through in my time.”

* * *

Rose helped Maz Kanata prep her little ship for launch, running the checklists, testing fuel lines and landing gears. All around her, the whole base was a whirlwind of preparations, with _literal_ winds whipping through now and again as ships taxied to the hangar doors and roared off into the greater galaxy. 

There was something else in that busy storm, too; an energy that had been too long missing. Perhaps Rose had managed to strike that small spark, after all; the one Poe had promised, so long ago, it seemed, that would burn the First Order down.

They had the spark. Now she just had to hold onto the light.

“I wish you weren’t going,” she confessed to Maz, as she handed over a last crate of supplies. “With Leia gone, it’s you who’s been the heart of the Resistance. You know so much, you’ve _seen_ so much. How am I going to get by without your advice?”

Behind her, R2 whistled, and gently nudged her leg. Maz smiled, and patted the droid’s scratched and weather-worn dome. “The Resistance is too big a beast to have a single heart.” She reached up to tap Rose once, over the breastbone. “Here is one. There are more, and will be more yet.”


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Poe and Rey have A Moment. Zorii reveals, if not a heart of gold exactly, then perhaps a minor gold deposit in the general pectoral region.

Once the Falcon was safely locked into a hyperspace trajectory, Poe allowed himself to be shepherded out of the cockpit into the crew quarters. “I’m gonna tip my hand a little here,” he said, easing himself into the bunk in the main passenger cabin. At the holochess table, Zorii and Babu hunched over a data pad, talking in low voices--planning their next job, perhaps, or at least their next move. “I might have been exaggerating before when I said I was fine.”

“Oh, you think?” Finn sat on the edge of the bunk and cracked open a medical kit. “Come on, let me see. It has to be cleaned.” 

“It doesn’t _have_ to,” groused Poe. He leaned forward anyway, resting his head on his hands, to give Finn a better look.

Finn cringed at the weeping wound and black, cracked skin. “Seems like dying of an infection would be a little less glorious than what you were going for today.” His words came out sharper than he’d intended. He balanced the kit across his knees, rifling through it for bacta wipes. 

“Finn--”

“No one’s asking you to die for the Resistance. I’d kind of prefer you to live for it.”

“The Resistance lives on without me.” Poe hissed when Finn made a tentative swipe of bacta. “Without knowing where Ren’s fleet is, we’re sunk.”

Finn’s hand dropped. The momentum of the last few hours had kept him moving up to this point, but now the impact of that fact caught him up. They’d come here with everything hanging in the balance; now, they had to walk away empty-handed. “Well,” he said, ripping open another wipe, “we didn’t find out anything about the fleet anyway. If this is the end--and I don’t believe it is--I don’t want to face it without you. Okay?”

Poe half-smiled against his hands. “Yeah. Okay.”

“Could I help?”

They both looked up at Rey. At her sides, her hands flexed, empty, against thin air. Finn opened his mouth to say that he might not be a Jedi but that he _did_ at least know how to use a medical kit. But something in the resolute set of her face suggested that this was about more than bandages and bacta wipes. Far be it from him to get in the way of a _moment_. “Go ahead.” He slid down from the bunk and moved out of the way. “And Rey, if you have a minute later …?”

“Yes, we’ll talk.” She smiled at him as she settled gingerly into the space he’d occupied. “Of course.”

Once Finn had retreated, Poe glanced up at her sidelong. “Sorry, by the way. If I embarrassed you up there.”

Rey didn’t laugh, but she didn’t manage to conceal her smile. “I think what you mean is that you’re sorry you embarrassed _yourself_ up there. May I?” He nodded, and her fingers tested the edges of the burn. She could see its outline reflected in the Force: not an absence, but an inversion of the way energy moved through the living flesh around it. She focused on the pattern and steadied herself. “I’ve … never tried this before. Leia described it to me, though; how it works. I think I can do it.”

“Okay. Great.” Poe nodded. “What is ‘it’, exactly?”

“I think I could heal you.”

It sounded so ridiculous, when she said it out loud. Poe squinted at her, evaluating, and evidently decided this was not, in fact, a poor joke on her part. “… Oh. Uh. Sure. Yeah, give it a shot.” 

She smiled lopsidedly-- _nervously_ , Poe realized, about half a second too late--and laid her hand flat over the blaster wound. He started to ask if she was sure this was safe, but then her palm blazed bright and hot against his skin and safety was a moot point.

He could feel his body remaking itself, burnt flesh refolding into fresh, blood vessels branching, lymph flowing. It didn’t hurt, exactly; it felt like being alive felt, except a great deal _more_ alive, and more intensely so, than usual. A thrilling energy, enormous in magnitude--and one shot through with terror of its own size and scope.   
He inhaled sharply, to cry out, to expel some of this overwhelming sense of vitality. But as soon as it had begun, it was over. Rey’s hand dropped back to her side. “There,” she said, with a small warm satisfaction. 

He reached over his own shoulder with his good hand (but they were _both_ good hands again now, weren’t they?) and found only smooth unbroken skin. “You did it.”

Rey sat back a little, injured pride pulling her shoulders protectively high and tight. “You don’t have to sound so surprised.”

“I think I kind of do.” He worked his arm back and forth, testing range of motion, flexibility. As good as new, he thought, or better. “ _Surprised_ tends to tag along with _impressed_.” 

She looked aside to hide the heat rising in her face. “It worked just as Leia said it would. I took some of my own life energy, and pushed it into you. That’s all.”

“Sorry, what? Your own _life_?” Poe sat up straighter. “Aren’t _you_ using that?”

“I can spare a little.”

He rubbed his shoulder again, thinking of what she’d given him, and the dark shadows cast over it. The energy that had strained the boundaries of his skin--was that what was going on inside her, all the time? “Are you … all right?”

Her brows knit. “I think that’s what I’m supposed to be asking you.”

“Rey … listen. I didn’t want you in the field with us because you’re strong--or, well, not only because of that. I wanted you here so that I didn’t have to make the tough decisions on my own.” He met her eyes without flinching when she stared at him, taken aback. “No, that’s not it either. It was so that, if it all went to hell, I wouldn’t be the only one left holding the bag.” 

He shook his head and broke eye contact first. He’d cost the Resistance most of its fleet. He’d cost thousands of good people their lives. He’d blown their chance to find Kylo Ren’s impossible fleet. And he couldn’t apologize to those he’d lost, so he apologized to Rey instead: “I’m sorry.”

Rey held very still, unsure of the shape of this moment and who would be the more hurt if she shattered it. “I’m not ready,” she said slowly, feeling her way forward. On the bunk, his fingers brushed hers; she didn't move her hand away. “I had a few days with Master Skywalker. Weeks, with Leia. And then they both left me alone, here, me--no one, with nothing, and I’m--” _Afraid_ , she didn’t finish. Afraid that hatred would overwhelm her. Afraid that she wasn’t worthy of finishing the legacy that had been passed on to her, secondhand. “I’m not a Jedi,” she finished.

“I guess not. But you're _not_ nothing.” Poe leaned forward, holding her gaze when it began to slide aside. “You're the one who gets to decide who you want to be.”

Rey stood. “You should rest,” she said, and hurried away.

* * *

In the cockpit, Chewbacca was running maintenance checks on the ship. She seemed little worse for the wear for this most recent misadventure; nothing a tune-up and a shield recharge couldn’t fix.

A middle-aged wookiee might not be good for much, these days. But he could at least keep a ship with this many stories in her up and running for many years to come.

Rey reappeared from the passenger cabin and dropped with a groan into the seat beside him. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

He reassured her that everything was fine; the ship was locked on target for Yavin 4 and all systems were, if not green, then at least comfortably yellow. She should get some rest while she could, he urged.

She smiled, but her heart wasn’t in it, and she wasn’t even looking at him anyway. “Thank you. I’m not sure I could sleep right now, though.” She played with the edge of the console, the bit where it was dented from a slip of Han’s boot while he’d sprawled in the same seat that Rey now occupied. “Do you ever,” Rey said slowly, “feel like an utter disappointment?”

The words struck Chewbacca like a fist to the middle of his chest. But he was a wookie, and he could take a punch. She wasn’t, he knew, talking about him. He rumbled his answer softly.

“Easy for _you_ to say.” She sighed and pushed back into the chair, putting her feet up on the console. “You’re already a hero a dozen times over. All I’ve ever done is wander into trouble and occasionally get myself out of it again. What do I have to show for it? Nothing.”

“Maybe not _nothing_.”

Rey sat up straighter and Chewbacca swiveled to look. Zorii stood at the back of the cockpit, leaning casually in the frame of the entrance. “Now look, kid,” she said. “I don’t want you to think that this is because I like you.” 

Rey smiled ruefully. “I would never presume that you liked me, Zorii.”

“Babu like you.” Rey looked down. Babu Frik stood beside her chair, holding up a data pad in his oversized hands. “Ippa ti malak.”

She reached for the pad and took it when he nodded. “I don’t understand,” she said, scrolling through the files listed. “I can’t read any of this. What am I looking at?”

“Babu pulled that from the computer back there.” Zorii leaned over Rey’s shoulder and tapped one entry in the list. “It turns out that before that place was _our_ digs, it was a Sith temple.”

Rey looked down at the null display on the pad. “This ... is a blank file that you’ve pulled up.”   
“Someone who was here recently left tracks in the system. Must have been them that charged it up in the first place. Then they wiped out whatever they were looking at.” Zorii nudged Babu forward with her foot. “But a good slicer can work around that. To some extent.”

Rey clutched the pad tighter. Her heart was pounding, her senses were alive. They were close now, so close, on the cusp between victory and utter defeat. If there was a chance … “What was he looking for here?”

“Something called a Sith Wayfinder.” Zorii shrugged. “Babu says they were some sort of navigational beacon. There were only two made, and the Emperor had found them both before he--” She drew a finger across her throat, accompanied by a choking noise. “One of them was apparently left on the planet Mustafar. But your friend who beat you here wiped out _everything_ about how to find that place.”

Despair eroded away the fine bright point of hope that had stirred in Rey. She let the pad fall out of her fingers; it clattered on the floor. “He’s so far ahead of us. He’ll already have been there.”

Chewbacca yowled. Mustafar, he said, had once housed Darth Vader’s fortress.

Rey frowned. “If Vader had one of these Wayfinders … the Emperor must have had the other.” 

Chewbacca mentioned that he had a rough idea of the Emperor’s last known whereabouts.

“The second Death Star?” Zorii scoffed. “You’re crazy. Half of that thing sank below the surface of the ocean moon of Endor. You want to find a dead man’s magic toy in the wreckage, you’re going to be looking forever.”

“If it’s connected to the Force,” Rey said, “I think I can find it.” She took a deep breath, and on releasing it, found that, yes, she still believed those words. She _could_ do this much.

Zorii snorted. “Good luck. I hope you’re better at holding your breath than you are at running recon missions. You’re not going to bump into nearly as many friendly, helpful spice runners at the bottom of the ocean.”

There might, Chewbacca allowed, be at least one.

“ _What!_ ” Zorii rounded on him. “You can’t mean to drag us along!”

Rey shrugged. “If you have a different ride available, you’re welcome to part ways with us anytime you like.”

“Damn Resistance.” Zorii snatched her data pad off the floor and stomped out of the cockpit.

Babu followed her--much more slowly and quietly. He paused at the door. “Still like you,” he reminded Rey, then disappeared around the corner.


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maz Kanata and Lieutenant Connix have business in the Alderaan system.

Once upon a time, the Empire had tried to scratch a world off the face the galaxy.

An entire planet had boiled and burned away. Universities and creches, museums and monuments, all reduced to cosmic rubble. Billions of lives lost in a single moment, a heartbeat, a sharply drawn breath. 

But worlds were not so easily destroyed as that.

From across the galaxy, the scattered survivors had returned to their system of origin, making a new home in the ashes of the old. Alderaan itself was gone, but the idea of it endured, kept alive in the hearts and minds of some two million Alderaanians who had reconvened in the system, scattered across the hundreds of ships of a massive flotilla. Alderaanians had always been a proud people and now they could add this last grim satisfaction to their storied history: that confronted by genocide, they had said _no_.

After the Empire’s downfall, they had enjoyed one more bitter triumph, too. At the request of their wayward princess, a portion of the wreckage of the first Death Star had been transported across the galaxy, to be deposited in the empty space where Alderaan had once been. What was left of the Death Star would still serve as a space station, but one built to preserve and protect life, not to destroy it.

These days, the flotilla orbited around a city in a bubble. The quadanium steel that had made up the focus lens of the Death Star’s superlaser housed layers upon layers of houses, shops, and open arcades; a geodesic plastisteel dome wrapped over the top held warmth and atmosphere close against the cold vacuum. Many flotilla ships were attached directly to the underside of the station, via a web of gleaming umbilici. Farther out, a network of shield nodes created a massive force field to hold back the constant barrage of debris within the system. The ghosts of Alderaan might be able to rest quietly, with the success of their descendants and the defeat of their enemies, but the recent dark chapters of galactic history could not all be so quietly forgotten.

“It’s very beautiful,” said Maz, at the controls of her ship. New Alderaan’s Arrival Control crew had billeted an umbilicus for them as they crossed through the force field and into the station’s proximity. “What a place to call home! You must have missed it very much.”

“Yes.” Lieutenant Connix stood just behind her, crouching to keep from banging her head on the low ceiling. “But somehow it seems smaller than I remember.”

* * *

Alderaan had been a garden planet, replete with orchards and greenways even in the hearts of her biggest metropolises. The architects of New Alderaan had meticulously followed the same blueprint. Down through the core of the city, a cylindrical garden ran, from the very base of the quadanium steel lens to the height of the dome overhead. This gardenwell provided the city with fresh air to breathe, of course, and fruit and vegetables to complement what had to be brought in from outsystem. But it had less tangible benefits, too, of course. Children ran and laughed among the undulating purple trunks of trees; beside fountains, beneath statues, people had left mementos in honor of their losses that long-ago day.

Maz and Connix emerged from the umbilicus tube into the station proper, on a street that might have passed for any planet-side passage were it not for the many layers of buildings criss-crossing overhead and the star-black sky beyond the dome. When they stepped out of the umbilicus port, they were greeted by the rich floral scent of the air. Connix sighed, letting her first breath of home back out as slowly as she could.

The air wasn’t the only thing there to greet them. Alderaan’s Regent Administrator, Eglyn Valmor, stepped forward amid a retinue of councilors and retainers, to bow shallowly to her guests. “Be welcome here.” She straightened up, looking between Maz and Connix. The years had stolen the color from her hair, but her eyes were just as bright. “I hope you will not be offended if I say these are not the faces I had hoped to see.”

Maz nodded gravely. “General Organa sends her regrets. She is sadly occupied on--family business. I hope you’ll accept us as emissaries on her behalf.”

“Of course.” Was that a new note of frost in the Administrator’s voice? She beckoned, sweeping her cape over one arm. “This way, please. Far be it from me to delay any agent of the Princess.”

Maz and Connix were ushered to a pleasant corner of the gardenwell, shaded from the city’s lights by cartwheel-sized silver-and-magenta leaves. A gaggle of children were playing a game of ball, but they scattered when Valmor’s assistants shooed them off. One or two lingered, peeping through the walls of greenery at the strangers. Maz might not have noticed, except that their bright eyes could be seen right at her own height. 

There was no obvious “front” to the space, but small pedestals--stools, really--dotted the ground here and there, and they found places to sit. Maz spoke first, while Valmor’s colleagues were still murmuring over seating arrangements and who might see about having refreshments brought in. “Regent Administrator, you must know that we’re here because General Organa seeks your aid.”

“My aid?” Valmor smiled slightly, though no humor shone through. She folded her hands atop her knees. “I’m afraid I would be little good against the might of the First Order. My eyesight is no longer sharp enough to put me in the hotseat of a Y-wing, though I might serve as a technician or mechanic, if that’s the sort of aid that Princess Leia requires of me.”

“Let’s not play games with words, Regent Administrator. You have ships. Ships that the Resistance very badly needs right now.”

“We’ve known peace for barely thirty years. We sacrificed everything. And you’re here to ask us to scrape up everything we have left, and throw it down the gaping maw of our losses?” Valmor stood, sliding her hands into her sleeves. “I’m sorry that you’ve wasted your time by coming here. If our Princess wanted so much from us, she might have at least showed her face to us here for the first time in decades to do it.” 

“But she isn’t just _our_ princess anymore.” Connix shot to her feet too. Maz closed her mouth and sat back, letting the younger woman take the lead. “She’s the galaxy’s, the _whole_ galaxy’s, and she’s spent her life trying to make sure what happened to Alderaan never happened to anyone else.”

“But it _did_ happen again.” Valmor lifted her chin, though she hardly needed the extra inch to tower over Connix. “It’s only by the grace of the Force that the second Death Star didn’t survive long enough to destroy another planet. And look at the Hosnian system--so many worlds destroyed all at once, so many lives cost. Where was she then?”

“ _More_ worlds would have suffered, without her,” argued Connix. 

“Is that so?” Valmor raised her eyebrows. Behind her, a pair of counselors exchanged glances, then looked down at their hands. “Was it not the princess’s own son who saw to the construction of the Starkiller? Perhaps if she’d seen fit to raise him among her people, teach him our ways, the galaxy would have been spared a great deal of suffering.”

Connix inhaled sharply. The angry, stubborn set of her face was familiar to Maz; Connix had, after all, learned it from the best. Maz wondered if Valmor recognized it in her, too. “Starkiller Base was _not_ General Organa’s fault. And isn’t it too late to be playing games with blame? The people of Alderaan have built something beautiful here. We’ve always been a peaceful people. But what good is peace without liberty?”

“There’s nothing here of interest to the First Order.” Valmor turned to depart, and her assemblage rose to follow her. “We’ll weather this storm, as we have so many others. Since you have taken culpability off the table, I will refrain from apologizing that you’ve wasted your time.”

Maz waited till the Alderaanians had gone before putting a hand on Connix’s wrist. The lieutenant’s fists had clenched, but her fingers slackened at Maz’s touch. “Your people are set in their ways. This has often been your strength, but sometimes--well. The general would be proud of your efforts here today. It’s not easy to speak truth to power.”

“No,” said Connix. She smiled, sad and triumphant at the same time. Like a station for survivors built in the empty space of the galaxy’s greatest mass grave. “But I wasn’t just speaking to _her,_ here.” 


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kylo Ren continues to spiral.

“Matter and energy. These are the same, in essence.”

The Builder’s voice echoed against the expansive rocky walls of the Emperor’s hidden chamber. Or perhaps it wasn’t an echo at all, but rather a multitude that, in concert, composed one greater voice. At a distance, aging Sith temple devotees sang a chant in an aching minor key. Somewhere outside, metal shrieked and sang as the Builder, with another portion of its divided attention, called yet another ship into being, shaping it from sheer nothingness.

Ren sat cross-legged on the rocky ground. He tried to tune the singers out, to focus on the meaning in the Builder’s words. But frustration gnawed at the ragged edges of his always-threadbare patience. The chanting, darkly beautiful and omnipresent, didn’t help either, nor did the inconsistent clatter of the Builder’s work. He took a long deep breath in through his nose and released it slowly. “Yes. Matter and energy.” 

“Matter is energy. Energy is the Force. Do you see, scion?”

“I understand,” he snapped, opening his eyes and breaking his meditation. The Builder coiled all about it him in its vaporous smog. Its face, outline blurred and edges vibrating, hovered just in front of him. “Yes. I understand. Show me.”

“We will show. It is up to you to see. Look.”

The Builder withdrew from Ren. Its formless body shaped itself into a ring, the center of which Ren could see through to the other side of the chamber. This ring rotated slowly about its empty center, a wide unseeing eye. Though the Builder’s face had disappeared, it still spoke. “Matter is energy, energy is the Force,” it repeated. “The Force is made manifest through you: the vessel.”

“Yes, but _how_?” Ren’s fists clenched on his knees. “What is the nature of the conversion? How do I shape the flow?”

“All is substantiated from nothing. The act of incarnation requires you to seek the void in yourself.” The Builder’s ring rotated faster. At the center of the hole in the middle, something began to accrete. Only a speck, at first, but growing swiftly, until a violet crystal winked at Ren. The Builder condensed, then expended outward, and the crystal dropped into Ren’s hand. 

“This is a kyber crystal.” He held it aloft, studying it in the meager light. “A pure one. How--?”

“Find the void,” counseled the Builder. “Through it, all things may be made. Recede inside yourself, as far as you may go. When all is nothing, everything becomes possible.”

Ren closed his eyes and sank once more into the darkness. Inside him was an abyss, vast and all-encompassing; there was nothing but the deep and breathless black.

Except--

Except not _only_ that. Here and there, pinpricks of light broke through. Thoughts, stray thoughts, idle thoughts of people he had betrayed, bridges he had burned. A child’s pointless daydreams, of hope in his mother’s eyes, of taking Rey’s hand as an equal. Of the comfortable, damp-fur-scented embrace of his favorite uncle. When he tried to expunge one such empty fancy, another one quickly burned through. Anger surged; the miniature stars trembled, but did not go dark. 

In the silent space between breaths, these stars whispered to him in his mother’s voice.

His fist clenched. The kyber crystal cracked into a thousand powdery pieces that snowed down between his fingers. He rose in one graceless movement. “That’s enough for today. I’ll be back soon.”

“Of course, Vader’s scion.” For a moment the Builder reminded Ren of nothing so much as Hux. Ridiculous, for one so vast, with power so far beyond what Ren could scrape up from his soul. The scope of its presence in the dark side defied description, logic. Perhaps some creatures were simply meant to serve. “I will see you again soon.”

* * *

The expansion of Ren’s fleet proceeded little better than his training in the Force.

“The navigational beacon that will guide the fleet clear of the atmospheric storm system is nearly finished,” Hux reported, standing behind him, at a respectful distance, upon his newly-christened flagship. “And as far as your new recruits are concerned, they are of course, eager to please. They are, however, inexperienced. And--” He glanced to the side. “On the _short_ side.

Behind him on the deck, a new “technician” was repairing a malfunctioning air filtration intake port. When Hux and Ren looked at him, he jumped and upended his toolbox all over the floor in a great clatter of noise. Under Ren’s eyes he held still, like a mouse frozen in wait for a predator’s strike. He might have been twelve or thirteen years old--old enough, anyway, to have absorbed enough technical training to manage the most rudimentary sorts of repair jobs. Ren looked away and heard the technician’s shuddering gasp of relief.

Hux cleared his throat. “Thus, while we have an attachment of senior officers detailed to each new ship, the transition continues to be moderately disharmonious. And of course even our more experienced officers require additional training with the second-generation planet-killer weapons that comprise the primary offensive capabilities of the largest capital ships.”

“We have time.” Ren stared out the window. His ships were, it seemed, as numerous as the stars in the storm-hidden skies. “We have the ships. We are safe. Hidden. We can bide our time until we are prepared to close our fist around the galaxy so tightly that no system will ever slide through our grasp again.”

“Yes, Supreme Leader.” Hux smiled, his thin rat-lipped smile, the only one he seemed to know how to produce. “So long as the Resistance doesn’t contrive to stumble upon us here.”

“That would be impossible. No one can get here without a wayfinder.”

Both men stood silent, for a while. Then Hux shuffled his feet. “And, Supreme Leader, you have the only one of those?”

The ingratiating voice, the sniveling air. Everything about Hux cried out to Ren to put him down like the worthless cur he was. Ren’s fists tightened. “Set a course for IX3244-C at once.”

“The Endor system, Supreme Leader?” Hux’s expression shifted and a new intonation changed his words from a petulant question to a statement. “The Endor system, Supreme Leader. Right away!” He turned to the navigation officer, micromanaging the challenging process of exiting the ionic storms as well as setting a hyperspace course.

Ren turned on his heel and stormed off the bridge in a swirl of cape. Hux looked over his shoulder, and relaxed slightly. “You heard the man,” he said, adjusting the hem of his uniform jacket. “It appears that another loose end requires trimming.”

* * *

  
The ghost was waiting in his quarters when he arrived.

“You look tired,” Luke said. He stood in one corner, as if filing himself away, out of the way. His hands were clasped in front of him, the robotic one overlaying the flesh. “I sense things are not going according to plan.”

“I have it under control!” Ren exploded. He lit his lightsaber and hurled it, end over end. 

The saber struck the wall blade-first and stuck there, humming, vibrating. It protruded directly through the chest of Luke’s ghost. Luke raised an eyebrow and stepped to the side, leaving the lightsaber behind. He sighed. “I’ve been disingenuous,” he confessed. “Expecting something from you that I’ve been unwilling to give myself. An apology.”

A chill wind of confusion blew across the flames of Ren’s anger. He lowered his fist. “What? I’m the one who--”

Luke held up his hand. “You don’t need to list your sins for my benefit. We both know what they are.” His chin lifted as he studied Ren’s expression. “But I sinned first, and I sinned against a child. I’m sorry, Ben. Snoke might have led you down this path. But I set your feet on it in the first place.”

It was too little. It was far, far too late. Ren’s fists curled at his sides. “And now you want me to open my heart and beg you for forgiveness in turn. Should I weep, uncle? Should I beat my chest? Fall on my knees at your feet?”

“I’ve told you already what you should do.” Luke shook an admonishing finger at Ren, as if he’d settled back into the old uncomfortable role of master and pupil. “You should talk to her.”

Ren blanched. “Don’t you dare--”

“Talk to her,” Luke urged. “She would listen. There is someone who cares about you left in the galaxy. You don’t want to throw that away.” His already haggard expression fell further. “Talk to her. Before it’s too late.”

Breath came too fast and too shallow. Ren’s head spun. He stepped back, away from his uncle. Toward a door that offered no true escape from the fears that gnawed him at night, from the anger that fed and nourished him. He could not meet his uncle’s eyes; his gaze dropped instead to the floor.

Vader’s helmet stared back at him.

There. That was a focus; that was a gravitational mass of attention into whose orbit he gladly fell. With a flick of the Force, he lifted it from the floor so that it spun, in the air, between him and his uncle.

Ren twisted his wrist. The helmet collapsed in on itself, its dome imploding, the mask and collar shattering upward. When he was finished, a jagged circle was all that was left. He beckoned, and the circle settled itself over his brow. Where it rested, it drew blood, and thin rivulets ran over Ren’s forehead, one dripping into his eye. “An emperor,” he said, with a calm wrestled at no small cost from the hurricane at his heart, “has nothing to say to a princess.”

His uncle flickered, and was gone.


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey, Finn, and Poe meet Company 77; Rey and Poe have whatever the opposite of a Moment is.

On all his travels with the Resistance, Finn had seen sights so beautiful they took his breath away: the lights of Canto Bight at night, before he’d gotten an eyeful of that city’s grimy underbelly. The jungles of Yavin 4, the ancient temple rising like a manmade mountain from the morning mists. 

He’d seen breathtakingly terrible things, too. Fathiers, hobbled and tightly confined. Children who’d scarcely seen the sky. The unseeing, empty eyes of friends and comrades.

He couldn’t think of anything he’d ever seen before that was both as beautiful _and_ terrible as the Death Star’s broken shell cutting through the mighty waves of Kef Bir.

Chewbacca had landed the Falcon on a rocky island shore, within seeing distance of the Death Star wreck, but hardly within reach. They stood now at the edge of the cliff, staring out at the inaccessible hulk.

Zorii was the first to speak up. “Well, I don’t know about any of _you_ ,” she sniffed, “but _I_ don’t swim.”

“We can’t land the Falcon on that.” Poe put up his hands, shielding his eyes from the sun’s fading glare. “There’s not a flat surface to be seen. It’s got to be unstable, too. I’m not sure there’s a plate in that hull that would support me, let alone a whole ship.”

“We’ve come this far!” Rey paced the edge of the cliff like a trapped beast. Like a caged fathier, Finn thought. “There has to be a way. Perhaps we could rig up a boat from the Falcon’s bedding--”

Finn watched asteroid-sized waves crash together on the surface below. It made the ocean on Hast Ovath look like a child’s wading pool. “I’m not sure makeshift boat is our best bet here.”

“I’m not sure we have a choice!”

“And _I’m_ not sure who you are and what you’re doing here.”

They spun around to find the speaker: a black human woman, astride a shaggy-furred mount. She had an energy bow leveled at Rey’s head; behind her, more mounted warriors spread out to flank the Resistance members. “Welcome to Kef Bir,” she said. “Explain yourselves.”

Finn nudged Poe with his elbow. “Look at their armor,” he whispered--though it wasn’t really armor at all anymore, was it? It was headbands, belts, bracelets, and unmistakable in its origins. “Stormtroopers.”

The woman’s sharp eyes turned to him. The aim of her bow followed. “Are you afraid, stranger, to find yourself among the enemies of stormtroopers?”

“No. No!” Finn’s hands came up, empty, palms facing her. “I used to be a stormtrooper. I’m not anymore.”

Her eyes widened. She slid off her mount and stalked toward him, until she stood directly in front of him. She leaned in close, tilting her head, looking at him from every angle. Then she stepped back, spinning slowly, taking in all of his companions one at a time. When she finished turning, she’d come back to him. At least, he noted, the bow was pointed away from everyone now. “You’re _him_ ,” she said slowly, doubting her own words. “You’re FN-2187.”

“I, uh--” Finn tried to step back, but only trod on Poe’s foot. “Have we met?”

Her smile was as unexpected as his old name. She spun to the other warriors and threw her arms wide. “It’s FN-2187!”

Spears fell from hands, bows were quickly reslung across backs. The mounted warriors spilled off their horses, surrounding Finn, shaking his hand, trying to give him the fractured pieces of old armor they wore. 

“Okay,” said Poe, as a pair of laughing warriors both tried to be the first to tie their necklaces around Finn’s neck. “I’m not the only one who’s confused, right?”

“Come with us,” the woman urged. She looked around, eagerly taking in all their faces. “Is it all true then? You’ve really joined forces with Luke Skywalker’s lost daughter? And the Princess-General’s son?” 

Rey and Poe exchanged uncomfortable glances. “Oh--oh, no,” Rey said, reddening. “I’m not--he isn’t--”

“We’re not cousins,” Poe finished definitively.

The woman raised her eyebrows. “Then I’ll look forward to learning more about FN-2187’s companions. Come; we have shelter, on the leeward side of the hill.” She looked out at the Death Star wreckage. “Is that why you’re here?”

Rey stepped forward, hoping to find the bridge she needed to make her way forward. “We need to get there as soon as possible,” she said. “Can you help us?”

“ _They_ need to get there.” Zorii crossed her arms. “ _I’ve_ been hijacked.”

“I think you mean ‘rescued’,” Poe corrected.

The woman ignored him, addressing only Zorii. “Why do you hide your face, stranger?”

Zorii grunted. “You wouldn’t like what you saw.”

“My people and I all wore masks once.” The woman spread an arm, indicating the tribe that had engulfed Finn. “Hiding our shame. We’re happier now, letting our faces see the sun.”

“Em holo du demek,” Babu Frik commented, from Zorii’s shoulder, and snickered. She shoved him back down into his pouch.

“Please,” Rey cut in again. “If you have a way for us to get out there--”

The woman shook her head. “Not tonight. The tides are against us now; you’d capsize before you made it halfway. The weather will turn before the morning. We have a couple of skimmers. I’ll take you myself, as soon as the sky is light.” She gestured back down the hill, the way she’d come. “In the meantime, please! Be our honored guests.” 

* * *

Rey lingered by the cliff after the woman, who said her name was Jannah, led the others away. She stood at the edge, letting the wind rake at her hair and clothes. “We should be going tonight,” she said, and dug her toes into the soft soil. “We don’t have time to waste.”

“We don’t have lives to waste either.” Poe paced behind her, trampling the brittle greenery that had managed to survive despite _the_ driving wind and salty spray. “We can wait ten hours if it means the difference between mission success and failure.” 

Ten hours. Ten hours was a lifetime, with this mythical fleet of Ren’s in the balance. In ten hours an already fragile Resistance could crumble; in ten hours a new Empire could rise. Inside herself, Rey retreated a little farther from the Force’s all-encompassing touch. If Kylo Ren christened a new galactic order in the blood of a hundred systems, would that be what it finally took to wash her away under the sea of his fear and hatred?

“Rey. Talk to me.” Poe put his hand on her shoulder. Under its weight, it was easier to turn away from the wreckage. “There’s something you’re not telling us.”

“What is there to say? Every moment we hesitate now is another opportunity the First Order has to end this war forever.”

“And what’s the damn _opportunity cost_ if we all end up dead at the bottom of an ocean?” They were nearly of a height, and when he leaned forward, their foreheads rested briefly together. Selfishly, Rey let it happen. “Whatever you think you need to do here, you don’t have to do it right this second. And you don’t have to do it alone.”

“But I _do_.” She looked away first. “If you’re suggesting the kind of _not-alone_ that I think you are.”

“… Right. Jedi. Attachments and things of this world and all that.” His hand fell away and for a moment, she wished she could take the words back. But only for a moment. Some things were more important than--more important than whatever this was. “Jedi are allowed to have friends, at least, I hope?”

“A friend …” Tension pulled her shoulders high and tight. Why couldn’t things ever be simple? Why could she not have this _and_ the Force too? It would be so easy to reshape the ancient rules, to make them fit more comfortably around her. But rules had been written for a reason, hadn’t they? Taking this one first step would only make it easier to take the next. And where did that road lead? She stepped back, creating more space between them. “A _friend_ would help me see this through.”

Whatever openness had been in his face a moment ago closed off now. “That’s not fair. Don’t turn this … whatever this is against me now.”

Of course it wasn’t fair. Nothing here was _fair_. When had fairness ever entered into the equation? Her fists curled at her sides as longing fled, its void quickly filled by frustration. “You’re just afraid.”

“I’m being practical! With this many lives hanging in the balance--”

“You’re afraid,” she said again, honing the words to their sharpest edges, “and what’s worse is that you’re not even afraid that we’ll fail, and the First Order will seize the galaxy in an unbreakable grasp.” She backed away further, looking down on him from the heights of the cliff’s edge. “What you’re most afraid of is that we’ll fail, and that it will have been _your fault_. What would Leia say, if she could hear you now?”

There was an instant of genuine hurt in his face. Then his brows came together as he pointed at her. “And _you’re_ afraid that you’re not the hero Luke Skywalker was. So you seesaw between hiding behind a pile of dusty rulebooks written by people a thousand years before you were born, and running headlong into the kind of stupid, dangerous choices that’ll you killed. Just because you’re afraid that you can’t live up to that kind of legacy!”

Rey inhaled sharply. Her eyes burned, but there were no tears to quell the sting. “Leave me alone,” she said, from between clenched teeth, and turned her back to him. Over the roar of the waves, she couldn’t hear his footsteps; but when she looked again, he was gone.


	21. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jannah explains the origins of Company 77 and Rey is back on her heroic bullshit.

Jannah and her people had carved a home for themselves out of Kef Bir: on the sheltered side of the cliffs, they had dug caves into the soft rock, and reinforced and covered these with salvaged scrap. Their makeshift shelter wasn’t merely sturdy and functional, either. The sides of the rust-pocked metal had been painted in places, simple one- or two-color patterns, and braided seagrass adorned doorways and windows. As Jannah led Finn down and around the curve of the hillside, he couldn’t help but be impressed by how much they’d achieved, and with so little. And at the bottom of the hill--

Finn stopped in his tracks. “That’s a First Order gunship,” he said. It had been disguised from above, covered with draped seaweed and ragged tarps.

“Hmm.” Zorii stepped up beside him to study the ship. “Fairly recent model too.”

“It’s got enough fuel for one more trip,” Jannah said. “We thought about destroying it after we landed here. But if they ever found us … we wanted a way out. Come!” She took Zorii by the elbow and beckoned to Finn and Chewbaca, beckoning them into one of the larger caves.

“I still don’t see how--” Finn followed her into the darkness of the threshold, then startled when light broke overhead, in fits and starts. Chewbacca growled, Zorii’s hand went to her blaster; all three of them went silent though as they looked around.

The light came from overhead, long strands of--something that either _was_ alive or _had_ been, twitching fronds or tentacles. Its pale yellow glow strengthened as Jannah kept walking farther into the room, toward the huge open wall at the back of the cave.

Whoever had painted the outsides of the cave had truly doubled down on their efforts in here. The entire wall was occupied not by abstract patterns but by a massive mural. The scene was painstakingly worked, and the artist had clearly learned as they went: Finn could read a beginner’s unsteady hand at the center, with skill and confidence growing outward.

At the middle of the painting stood a group of rudimentary figures marked out in stark white and black. “Stormtroopers,” Finn whispered.

Lines of red fire slashed back and forth across the wall. At the left side there stood a second group of stormtroopers, as well as First Order officers in solemn black; to the right was a lovingly-rendered village, populated with painted figures. Tiny as they were, Finn could read fright in their miniature faces; flames crowned the roofs of the buildings and bodies lay crumpled at their feet. His stomach churned. He’d seen scenes like this, up close and altogether too personal. He’d lived such scenes.

Or maybe he hadn’t. He looked back at the stormtroopers in the middle.

They had their backs to the village. They had their blaster rifles pointed at their own officers and fellow troopers.

They were protecting the villagers, not destroying them.

“Company 77,” said Jannah. She reached up and ran her fingers over the stormtroopers’ painted boots. “That’s us. Most of us, anyway. A few of them came with us, too.” She gestured to the huddled figures of the civilians. “There wasn’t much left for them there.”

“That’s amazing.” For a moment, Finn thought he’d found a blurry part of the painting; he blinked fast and it cleared. Chewbacca lay one massive paw on his shoulder. “You’re heroes.”

“You were our hero first.” Jannah smiled at his look of surprise. “We told each other your story, at night. When the officers were asleep. FN-2187, the stormtrooper who said no.” She nodded behind Finn’s back; he turned, and found dozens of living faces, painted with wonder and amazement rather than dyed clay. 

“You did it,” said one man, stepping forward, “and that’s how we knew we could do it too.” He had a baby in his arms, which he handed to Finn, who accepted the squirming bundle with as much graciousness as he could muster and a great deal more anxiety. “Her name is Tooun. It’s short for--”

“For 2187,” Zorii finished. “We get it.” Chewbacca yowled softly in admonishment, and stroked the baby’s cheek with one gentle finger. 

Finn swallowed around a sudden thickness in his throat. “I don’t know what to say.” But he said anyway, without knowing: “Rose would have loved to see this place.”

“’Scuse me, excuse me, can I just--” Poe elbowed his way through the crowd. The wind had made an even greater tangle of his already eternally-mussed hair. “There you are. If you still have something you wanted to say to Rey, you can find her sulking by the cliff.” He gestured broadly. “Go confess your undying whatever.”

“What? I’m not--she and I are just--I thought _you_ \--” Finn derailed that train of thought before it went somewhere neither of them wanted to go. He shook his head and passed the baby back to her father. “Never mind what I want to talk to Rey about. Did you say _sulking_?”

“She wants to make the crossing now. The usual death-defying heroics deal.”

Zorii snorted. “Says the idiot who took a nose-dive off the side of the Hanging City.” 

“Are you from Hast Ovath?” Jannah asked her, head tilting with interest. 

“I’m freighter trash, kid. I’m not ‘from’ anywhere.”

“I’m not either,” Jannah confessed. “Or at least, I don’t know where I was born. I’ve been to Hast Ovath, though, on a deployment.” She smiled sadly. “It could’ve been a nice homeworld.”

“You need to visit some nicer planets,” Zorii informed her.

“Sorry, go back a second.” Finn grabbed Poe’s shoulder, dragging his attention away from whatever was happening between Jannah and Zorii just now. “You said Rey is upset about not getting to the Death Star soon enough. And you left her alone out there?”

Poe opened his mouth for a quick retort that died unspoken. “Zorii’s right,” he said. “I _am_ an idiot.”

“Come on!” Finn raced out of the cave, with the others close behind.

* * *

Rey was, to no one’s great surprise, gone. So was one of the skimmers belonging to Company 77.

“Where is she?” Poe squinted, scanning the sea’s surface, looking for where she might be. With the toss of the waves, it was hard to be sure: was that a trick of the light? A bit of flotsam? Or a distant skimmer? He caught himself rubbing his shoulder where no scar remained to show where a blaster bolt had struck him, and stopped, shaking out his fingers. “Damn it! What is she thinking, pulling a stunt like this?” 

“She’s probably at the bottom of the ocean by now,” said Zorii, arms folded. “That’s a hell of a storm brewing out there.”

“Oh, that’s not a _storm_ ,” said Jannah, with a toss of one hand. “That’s just evening on Kef Bir. You should see a proper storm.” Zorii regarded her silently, posture as unreadable as her faceless helmet.

“Somehow I fail to find that comforting.” Poe let his arms fall to his side. “If we can’t spot her … Finn? You okay, buddy?”

“She’s all right.” Finn’s hand moved slowly. His eyes were unfocused, yet his hand came to a decisive stop, pointing out in the direction of the wreckage. “She’s out there. See?”

Poe looked again. He still saw nothing but wind-tossed waves. “No. I don’t see.” He studied Finn’s face sidelong, calculating. Wondering. “But if you say _you_ do, you know I believe you.”

“I …” Finn’s faraway look snapped back to the here-and-now. “I think that’s where we’ll find her.”

“We have to try,” Poe agreed, and turned to Jannah. “I hate to ask you for your only other skimmer …” 

Jannah shook her head. “Bring it back if you can. But more importantly, sail it true.”

“I will,” he started to promise, but Chewie interrupted him with a bellow. The wookiee pointed up, not at the sea but at the sky.

A First Order transport sliced through the gnarled clouds.


	22. Chapter 22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kylo Ren and Rey converge on the Death Star wreckage.

The girl was close. Her presence eclipsed Kylo Ren’s awareness only as his TIE fighter cut into the atmosphere of Kef Bir, trailing water vapor in its wake.

She was-- _different_. Smaller, somehow; her presence in the Force unmistakable and yet altered. Like a dim distant star, all but obscured by the glow of the Force’s greater universe all around her. 

Pressurized, and therefore volatile. A would-be neutron star, on the verge of collapse.

And, as far as Ren could tell, she was unaware of his approach. He could, and would, capitalize on that.

Here was the opportunity on which he’d fixated. For all these months, in his mind, he’d polished the coming moment to a bright cherished shine. The horror in her face, when she knew herself and all hope lost. The sear of scorched flesh; the pulse of the Force as it absorbed a modicum of fading life. He knew what he needed to do.  
What he wanted to do--

He _wanted_ her to look at him again like she had before Snoke’s throne room. When she’d thought there was something left in him worth saving. Only his mother had thought that, before. And he’d already proved her wrong a thousand times over.

Inconvenient memories burned. No. He silenced his stormy thoughts before they could disturb the shell of Rey’s enclosure against the Force. Emotion disappeared behind the cloak of cold calculation.

Choices had been made. Blood had been spilled. His destiny was a black hole: a hungry maw powerful, terrible, glorious, and one whose gravity well permitted no turning back.

* * *

Rey’s boots echoed in the vast, yawning cadaver of the Death Star.

The floor pitched at a nauseous angle, the ceiling caved in toward the unseen horizon. Each step carried her deeper into the wreckage and deeper into the shadow of her own solitude. It hurt, to have come so far and to find herself once again so alone. She was no Solo or Skywalker, bound into this story by blood and fate. She wasn’t even a Jedi, however hard she tried to hew to that path, with only scraps of instruction to show for herself. Nor any proper hero of the Resistance: she’d let them struggle and suffer through the evacuation of D’Qar, the winnowing of the fleet, and most of the Battle of Crait, all while she clawed after a dream that never could have been hers.

A real hero would have been there to turn the tides of battle. A real Jedi would have turned Kylo Ren’s heart, as Luke Skywalker had once done for Darth Vader. A real leader like Leia Organa would have known what to do. Who to be.

Rey was no one, and she was nothing, and nothing and no one would always return to her, in the end. She had made sure enough of that, hadn’t she?

Her boot slipped on the wave-wet decking. Her feet went out from under her. Groping desperately for purchase all the way, she slid into a gaping wound in the floor.

Her body took over from her conscious mind: a spatial awareness only possible with the Force--or the kind of instinct hard-wired into muscles and nerves from years of scavenging. Her hand shot out and grabbed a dangling piece of rebar. Metal shrieked, but it held, and Rey got her boots against the sloping wall downward.

Down. Yes. She focused on the task at hand. In the bowels of what had been the Death Star, she could sense the wayfinder: a pinprick of awareness. Of self-awareness, perhaps. It seemed almost as if it were calling to her. But it was only a simple object, a tool, not a living being. That was fear and superstition speaking, not reason.  
As Rey descended, handhold by handhold, darkness won over the shallow spurts of sunlight that had penetrated into the higher levels of the wreck. Her lightsaber-- _Luke’s_ lightsaber--blazed to life in her hand, pressing the shadows back into their corners with its blue glow. 

In places, the wreckage had collapsed in on itself. Rey tried to squeeze around wall-bending cricks in the corridors and through the constrictions where floor nearly met ceiling. The farther in she went, though, the tighter the spaces grew. As her descent deepened, so too did her frustration. All the while the wayfinder’s call grew louder, playing its siren call on her tight-strung nerves.

The path narrowed, and narrowed further. Rey extinguished the lightsaber and tried to force her shoulders through the uneven gap. Too small: she couldn’t seem to squeeze past its tightest point. There was no way forward here.

When she tried to retreat, she found herself trapped.

Panic set in too fast. Her boots tore at the floor behind her, struggling for purchase, forward or back. There was none to be had. Her breath came fast and shallow; dark circles and bright lights blotched her vision. The Force rolled in and out like an inexorable tide, just beyond the edge of her grasp.

A stupid child. A waste of Force abilities.

Part of her wanted to give up. If she died here, quietly and alone--alone, of course alone, alone in the beginning and alone at the end--she would never see the consequences of her failure.

But there were others counting on her, trillions of lives in a vast spinning galaxy, depending on her without even knowing it. For them, she strained her back against the ceiling and tried to crush herself through the impossibly small gap.

Someone else’s footsteps sounded lightly in the darkness ahead. 

Gasping for breath, Rey looked for their source. She caught only the edge of a dark gown or cloak disappearing around a corner.

Ren had somehow known she was coming here. Who else could it be?

And he was going to beat her to the wayfinder.

She screamed. Where conscious thought had failed, her unconscious mind succeeded, bending the metal away from her body in every direction. Edges splintered and she left blood and skin behind when she lurched the rest of the way through. 

The lightsaber led the way once more. Now its light trembled and shook, as Rey skidded and stumbled, trying to catch up with the figure that always seemed one step ahead, one stride faster, than she could match.

“Stop!” she screamed, and threw herself around one more corner.

Her voice echoed. This chamber was so much bigger than the corridor--the vent?--through which she’d entered. A window, a proper window, strewn with seaweed, gaped overhead, and a massive chair sat, barely askew, beneath it. Upon it rested a figure, legs comfortably askew, hands loosely but possessively grasping the armrests.

It was not Kylo Ren.

It was Rey.

“Welcome.” The other Rey smiled. It was Rey’s own face, her genuine smile, but there was an unfamiliar coyness dancing in those eyes. “This is what you think you’re looking for.” She lifted one hand, and a fist-sized object spun up from the ground in front of Rey.

The wayfinder. It pulsed dark red, like the beating heart of some arcane creature. As Rey had told herself before, it was only a thing, only a tool; and yet it was more than that too. Her arm slackened, the lightsaber angling down toward the floor. Through the wayfinder, an unfathomable channel of dark side energy flowed: it was via the wayfinder that this projection of some other version of Rey could be manifested.

But not only because of the wayfinder. The other end of that circuit, Rey realized with a nauseous twist in her guts, originated with her. “You’re not me,” she said, stupidly, her tongue sticking dryly to her teeth. 

Her mirror-image shook her head. “I’m not all of you,” she corrected, with a knowing cant of her head. “But what would you be without me?” She stood. “I’m the twitch of fear that kept you alive while you scavenged in the worst wrecks.” She stepped toward Rey, stepped again. Rey’s legs trembled, but she didn’t move away, could not remember how. “I’m the fire of hate that you stoked to keep yourself warm, counting the nights that your parents never came back for you. I’m the ambition that carried you to Ahch-To to convince the last living Jedi to teach you.”

“Fear isn’t--I never _hated_ \--” Rey swallowed hard as the other version of her stopped, almost toe-to-toe with her. Could she truly feel hot breath on her face, or was that her imagination? She remembered the lightsaber in her hand, and brought it to bear, slashing at the center of her own vision. “I don’t need the dark side!”

Impact jolted all the way up Rey’s arm. The other Rey had blocked her strike with a double-bladed lightsaber, an uncomfortable echo of her old staff. The other Rey smiled. “I don’t want to fight you. I want to know: what _do_ you need, Rey? What do you want? To break yourself down, tear parts of yourself away, to fit into the Jedi mold? Is that really it? When you could keep them safe-- _all_ of them? Your friends. Your heroes--the ones who have survived meeting you, at least. The whole galaxy.” Her arm flexed and she pressed Rey back. “You need me for that.”

“No!” She shoved the other Rey’s blade back and, with all her strength, executed an overhead thrust at her face.  
Her lightsaber whistled through empty air and pierced hilt-deep into the metal of the wall.

She stayed there for a moment. The other Rey had vanished. Her breath came uneven, a shrill counterpoint to the deep even hum of the lightsaber. When she thought her legs would hold her, she staggered upright. 

The red glow of the wayfinder turned her head. A laugh ripped out of her, threatening to break open the fragile seams that held back hysteria. She’d done it. It had been worth it. It wasn’t too late. She stooped, and her fingers closed around cold rough metal.

Behind her, a boot crunched.

She spun. Kylo Ren stood, half his face lit by a shaft of light from the ruined window, half cast in darkness. He had added a crown, since last they met, a wicked circlet of twisted black metal. Laughter spasmed in her throat again, but this was more fragile than that of a moment before. “No,” she said. “You’re not real.”

The lightsaber in his hand surged to life, searing her eyes. She stood still as he approached her at a walk, then a loping run. Only at the last moment, as the heat of the lightsaber drew too close to her heart to deny, did she throw herself aside.


	23. Chapter 23

First Order transports were lightly armed: a few forward-mounted long-range blaster turrets and one rear-facing. They didn’t bear the heavy artillery of a proper gunship nor even the middling firepower of a light cruiser. 

That fact was the only thing that kept Company 77 and its guests alive.

The initial volley chewed its way across the cliff where Finn and Poe had stood mere moments before. Rocks the size of snubfighters sheared free of the rocky edge and tumbled to rest on the beach below. 

From the shelter of a ridge farther down, Poe popped his head up to check the damage. “They’re here because of us,” he groaned. Down the hill, voices pitched higher in alarm. The blaster screamed in again from overhead, raking the leeward side where the caves opened to the air. Beneath him, the soil rumbled with the collapse of underground tunnels. In his mind, the beautiful mural cracked and crumbled to bits. “We need to get in the air if we’re going to have a shot at them.” He pushed to his knees, risking the loss of cover for a glance at where the Falcon rested just behind the crest of the hill. “If we can just get to the Falcon--”

Finn snatched his sleeve to pull him back down. “The Falcon’s not going to hold all of Company 77,” he objected. “We can’t leave them here unprotected.”

“Unprotected?” Jannah unshouldered her energy bow. “I think you’ve forgotten who we are, Finn-2187. We can hold them off long enough to get everyone into our transport.”

He didn’t correct her addition to his new name. “Jannah. There’s got to be a hundred troopers on that thing.”

“And there’s nearly as many here.” There was a hard set to her jaw, the memory of a smile. “The only difference between us is that _we_ have something worth fighting for.”

“Where will you even go? You built a home here.”

Briefly she clasped his shoulder. “We found our peace,” she said. “The rest of the galaxy deserves the same chance.” Then she was off, running down the hill in a defensive crouch, already shouting orders to her lieutenants who had come looking for her.

Zorii sighed noisily. “They’ve been on this literal backwater for years. They’ve got to be out of fighting shape.” She levered herself upright and drew her blaster. “Someone had better make sure she doesn’t get herself killed fighting the good fight.” With a surprising lightness, she leapt over the ridge and followed Jannah.

“Spice runner with a heart of gold,” muttered Finn. “Who’d have thought?”

“Zorii’s a soft touch. If it’s the right person doing the touching.” Poe checked his blaster, then jerked his head toward the Falcon. “C’mon. Let’s get to the ship while we can. We’ve got to get to Rey, and I’ve got an idea.”

“Get to Rey? How? We can’t land the Falcon on that thing!”

Poe punched him in the side. “Now who said anything about _landing_?”

* * *

The Death Star was a labyrinth and Rey was lost, hopelessly lost, within it.

Everyone had heard stories of the Empire’s mighty battle station, how big it was, a city’s worth of arches and walkways and building-sized rooms. As a child, Rey had imagined it in nightmares, blotting out the greater part of Jakku’s sun-scorched skies.

For all its terrible size she had never dreamed it could be so claustrophobic. The walls were close, too close, so that her own hot ragged breath bounced back to her. She bounced off corners, skidded up gap-toothed stairs. Searching for a way back up into the light.

She had fought so hard to close herself off from his all-polluting mind and in doing so she had left herself insensate to his approach. _Stupid_.

Her foot punched through a weakened grate and she clutched the wayfinder into her belly to keep it from plunging into the nothingness. A distant splash rolled up to her as the grate struck the darkness-shrouded waves far below. For a shattered moment she listened for the steady footsteps behind her--he was so much _bigger_ , how could he move so swiftly and smoothly through this place? Hearing nothing, she heaved herself up to the next intact step and started moving upward again. 

Except the shadows that spilled down the stairs were deeper than before. She flung her head back, and looked up into Ren’s expressionless face.

“No!” She snatched her lightsaber and drove into him with a sweeping cut, one that he easily turned aside, igniting his own saber and flicking it up between them.

“You have something that belongs to me.” He leaned into their clashing sabers with his greater weight and the advantage of his higher ground.

Anger spiked, carrying Rey along with it. “The wayfinder is mine.” She stopped trying to match her strength against his and twisted aside. Ren fell into the newly opened space, but he had control of his body’s momentum. He landed solidly on one foot, already slicing sideways with his saber.

The blade opened a gash in the wall, but Rey wasn’t there. She took the stairs two at a time to their ending above and flung herself around the corner. She couldn’t fight him and win. Not without making herself something more like him--and would that even be a victory at all?

“Not the wayfinder.” His voice echoed in the corridor around her. Where was he? He couldn’t have gotten ahead of her so quickly. “Though you won’t leave here with that, either.”

The ceiling shattered in a blaze of red light and he dropped to the deck on Rey’s heels. She tumbled and came up with her lightsaber just in time to stop his blade as it swept down toward her. “What, then?” she screamed. She stumbled back, blocking each arm-jarring blow that he swung at her as he drove her backward. “What do you want from me?”

He barely seemed to expend any effort at all, though sweat streamed down her brow in the Death Star’s clammy confines. “Only what I deserve.” She caught his saber against hers, but left her side open; his elbow slammed into her ribs and drove the air from her lungs. “You’ve bested me twice. You will not again.” 

White stars of pain went supernova in Rey’s sight. She retreated--and found herself at the edge of an unguarded chasm. Her boots nudged debris over the edge and she did not hear it land, not with Ren advancing on her. She tried to toss her wet hair out of her eyes, but it stuck to her face, slicing away the edges of her vision. 

“Don’t you see?” Ren went on, pressing her until her muscles screamed. “I have to reclaim the legacy that is mine. As a Skywalker.” His blade spun, and carved in toward her. “As _the_ Skywalker.”

His blade crashed into hers. Both lightsabers screeched their challenge. Rey’s heel found the edge of the cut-off, and slid over.

It should have been so easy here, for him to overpower her. To drive her off the edge, and into oblivion. 

Rey’s back arced. Her feet kicked up, one and then the other. The first struck his wrist, sending his lightsaber up and away from her; the second clipped his chin. The backflip carried her over the edge of the sheer wall but she rejected gravity’s insistent tug. She landed on her feet, perpendicular to her point of departure. Her knees bent with the impact and she tied the rebound of her own muscles into the Force as she leapt back up, over Ren’s head, to hit the deck behind him.

“Your legacy,” she spat, and now it was _her_ driving _him_ , as he moved sideways to skirt the edge over the chasm. For months she’d shut out the Force and now as her walls crumbled it came rushing back in, all but shutting out conscious thought, tapping into the deep and hurt-hidden parts of her. Anger surged, and it lent her new strength. She’d worry about how to pay the interest on that loan later. Her lightsaber nipped out, notching his forearm; another thrust nearly cost him his left ear. “Do you want to talk about your _legacy_?”

His foot slid, giving way beneath the brunt of her attack. She was smaller, she was weaker. Her experience with the dark side that drove them both saber-to-saber now was shallow, nothing at all compared to his. And yet, she was moving him back. A growl squeezed out of his throat, strangled and spit-flecked, a cornered animal’s response. “You can’t--”

She could. She flung out an arm, and the impact reeled through the Force. He crashed backward, through a wall and out into the empty space beyond.

* * *

Finn jumped.

A weightless moment. Impact, feet-first. Then icy water closed over his head. Momentum carried him farther down than he’d expected. The shock of the cold drove the air from his lungs; he choked, sucking down salt water instead of needed breath. His legs kicked reflexively and his arms reached--

He broke the surface.

Poe’s hand seized the back of his shirt. “Buddy! You okay?”

Finn tried to answer, but instead of words, only saltwater dribbled between his lips. The bottom seemed to drop out of his stomach--no, not his stomach, that was the sea pulling away beneath him. A massive breaker crashed down over their heads and they came up clinging together, half paddling and half panicking.

“Hell of a day for a swim,” Finn gasped, and Poe pulled him along into a tentative side-stroke, making for a low point in the Death Star wreckage. If Finn looked back over his shoulder, he could sometimes see Chewbacca still standing on the ramp of the Falcon where she hovered just out of reach of the waves. The rest of the time, though, ship and wookiee alike were hidden behind the huge swells of water.

They would find their way back to the Falcon. Finn set his jaw and started kicked harder. But first, they would find Rey.

From his vantage point, tossed about by the churning water, Finn couldn’t have seen that Chewbacca wasn’t looking at him, but up and out over the bulk of the Death Star. Searching for something. For someone.

* * *

By the time Rey stepped up to the new hole she’d opened in the Death Star’s hull, her breath came more evenly, her pulse beat quick but steady in her temples. The ocean of the Force still raged inside her, tides turning, light pulling against dark and dark against light, but it no longer threatened to submerge her. How could it? She could walk on water now, if she wished.

Daylight shone through the hole, and gray sky was visible; she’d found the outside of the antique superweapon. She looked down and found Kylo Ren, in an indentation in the Death Star’s hull the size of a city block. 

He rolled up from his side, ten or fifteen feet below her, and brought up his lightsaber. His crown had been lost in the fall, leaving only angry red welts where it had pierced his skin. Where before he’d wiped his face clean of any emotion, a hundred now churned: hatred and humiliation and anger and pain. 

This time, she did not put up a barricade against those emotions. She took them into herself and made them something new. Made them her own, and turned them against him. She cradled the wayfinder in the crook of one arm, reassured by its weight.

“Once,” she said, coldly, cuttingly, “you told me I was no one. Nothing.”

He said nothing. His inhalations were tight, cut short by pain. He braced his wounded arm and waited for her attack.

“And I suppose I am. But at least I came by it honestly. You?” She spat the word. “You had everything. Parents who loved you. Wise people to teach you.” She stepped forward into thin air and landed lightly on the deck in front of him. 

There was a split second where she dropped to the deck, where Ren might have had an opening. But he didn’t seize it. As if he were waiting to hear what she’d say. “Every chance in the world to be treasured and brave and kind. And you threw it all away.” 

They stood like statues, each daring the other to move first. A huge wave crashed over the side of the Death star, drenching them both, though neither budged. Had Rey’s rage lifted the water so high off the surface? She could no longer truly tell. That frightened her, but it was such a small fear, only a corner of her mind buried under the greater mass of writhing emotion. 

Still she did not charge. But she leveled her lightsaber at him as she spoke, and her arm was no longer trembling. “Do you want to know something, Ben?”

“That’s not my name!” he roared. Spittle flew from his lips.

“You’re nothing, too. Because _that’s what you chose to be_.”

He broke. He roared as he came at her, bending his knees at the last moment to leverage his much greater mass up into her and bowl her over.

But she was faster. She parried, and used her momentum to slide in close to him, an angle too narrow for him to easily navigate with his saber. Her foot caught him in the side of the knee, buckling it. The lightsaber spun in her hand and she thrust backwards.

Later, she would think of this moment, and think how easy it was, how the lightsaber slid through flesh as if it were only so much air, how it should have been harder, shouldn’t it, to kill someone? 

She extinguished the blade but the damage was done. The smell choked her, scorched leather and scorched flesh, the acrid metal tang of burnt blood. She gagged as he dropped to his hands and knees, and collapsed.

He was dead by the time he hit the deck. What dread and anger had reddened his face had bled away now, and he was as expressionless as he had been when he found her belowdecks.

She looked around, for help, for guidance. There was only the lash of the salt spray from the sea, the accusatory screams of the wind. “I didn’t mean to,” she said, to no one, to Kylo Ren’s unlistening ears. “I didn’t want to--” But that wasn’t true and she could not bear to lie, not now, not even to herself and the voiceless wail of the wind.

In his glassy eyes, she saw her own reflection doubled.

The hate, the fear, the gnawing ache had not disappeared with his death. They’d _redoubled_. 

This darkness had never been his at all. It had been hers, it had been _her_. She was the source of this churning stain in the Force and she could never have hidden from it, however deep she retreated. She and Ren had been so different, and yet on one key axis, just the same:

Both of them had been offered everything they’d wanted, or at least what they’d needed.

And both of them had taken that gift and broken it. 

Small wonder Leia had left. She’d seen Rey going down the same path to which she’d already lost her son. 

Her fingers brushed the corner of the wayfinder, where she’d tucked it into her shirt. She gripped it, centered herself on its sharpness and weight. She backed one up step, then two. She turned and she fled.


	24. Chapter 24

Every step over the Death Star’s sea-slicked surface was an exercise in precariousness. 

It didn’t help that Poe and Finn were already soaked from their brief-yet-excruciating ocean dip. Poe’s boot slipped navigating a shallow foothold between one deck and the next; only a quick reaction from Finn saved him from a quick trip thirty feet straight down into a jaggedly-torn flap of the Death Star’s hull. 

“You’re sure this is the right way?” he asked, not for the first time, once he’d caught his breath. “She could be anywhere in this wreck by now.”

“I’m sure.” Finn led the way as if he had a wayfinder of his own built into his head and homed in on Rey’s position. “I know she’s here somewhere.” He dug in for a handhold on a dented seam, and hauled himself upward onto nearly-level terrain. Once he got there, he turned around and extended a hand for Poe to lever himself up too. “We’re on the right track, I promise.”

“I just don’t understand how you can be so certain that you--” Poe stopped short. “Hang on. Hang on! Are you _Force sensitive_?” He bent double, immobilized by a burst of laughter. “Is _that_ all you’ve been wanting to tell Rey?”

Finn stopped too. “Don’t make fun of me.”

“No, no! I wasn’t--I mean, that’s amazing!” He smacked Finn across the chest with the back of his hand. “You do know that’s amazing, right?”

“I don’t know what it is.” Finn shrugged uncomfortably. “Sometimes I just … know things. In the back of my head, things I can’t really know. Except that I _do_. I’m not a Jedi, it's nothing like that. I’m just a jumped-up battle grunt lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.” He half-smiled. “And meet the right pilot.”

“Lucky enough--listen.” Poe grabbed the front of Finn’s jacket and gave him a good shake. “You’re my best friend and you’re a good man and you’ve got a place in all this. And not ‘cause you’re lucky or because the Force happened to give you a boost now and then. It’s because you _chose_ that place for yourself.” He let go. “And I can’t believe you don’t see that yet.”

“Poe, I--” Finn’s expression shifted. “Rey?”

Poe spun. There she was, running headlong down one of the Death Star’s massive girders. Her arms and legs pumped, heedless of her narrow path or the heights that threatened if she should slip. She ran like death’s own dragons were on her heels. “Rey!” he shouted. Whatever they’d said to each other before, her desperation now sanded all the rough edges between them flat. He grabbed for his blaster, ready to put an end to whatever threat had her on the run.

She skidded to a stop, looking around. When she turned toward him and Finn, the despair plastered over her face knocked the wind out of him. “Something’s wrong,” he said, and took off toward her.

He lost Finn’s response to the wind. Rey was saying something too, shouting, her mouth open wide, but she was still too far away and he couldn’t make out the words. “Just hang on!” he shouted, stupidly, it wasn’t as if she could possibly hear him when he couldn’t hear her, but--

Rey flung up a hand between them. An invisible fist struck Poe in the chest, flipping him over, rolling him end over end along the ridge of the Death Star. He pushed to his knees, ears ringing, and spat blood from a split lip. 

“I said you need to _stay away from me_ ,” Rey screamed. When Finn scrambled over the edge of the rise, she put her hand up again. This time, with more control, she pushed him back but didn’t send him flying. 

“Wait!” Finn shouted. The dread on her face hit him like a hammer to the chest. “Rey! What happened? Just talk to us!”

“Stay away,” she repeated. She stepped backward for a few paces, watching to make sure they didn’t follow. Then she turned and jumped, disappearing from their sight. Finn got up to follow her, but a TIE fighter screamed up out of a hidden crevice, and Rey’s pale face could be seen behind the cockpit glass. The fighter arced off into the sky, away from them.

“She can’t get far.” Poe staggered to his feet. “TIEs aren’t hyperspace-capable. If we get back to the Falcon we can--”

The TIE blinked out of sight. Far, far out of their reach, headed to parts unknown.

Finn sat down hard, on the Death Star’s skin, and let his head hang between his knees while Poe paced and cursed behind him. Something important eluded him, a fragment of truth whose jagged edges he couldn’t quite match up with the rest. Rey’s haunted behavior, the unusual TIE--he sat up straighter. “Ren must be here,” he said. “ _What did he do to her?_ ”

* * *

Kylo Ren breathed in.

No. That was wrong. Kylo Ren was dead; slain, in a tender irony, by the hand of a would-be Jedi. 

Yet someone breathed in. And someone breathed out, again, exchanging fouled air for fresh.

If it wasn’t Kylo Ren, who was it?

He opened his eyes. Fading daylight and water droplets made an incoherent watercolor of his field of sight. A woman’s blurred face hung over him, and her hand rested on his chest--

His chest. He fumbled for the open wound, the hole that the girl had carved all the way through him. Finding nothing, he tore off his glove; with his fingers, he found only whole flesh, not even a scar to show the way.

He blinked, his vision clearing at last, and stared up into his mother’s sad, drawn face.

A Force projection, he thought, and his lips parted in a snarl. He wouldn’t fall for that trick again. And yet--

The weight of her hand on his chest.

Her knee, against his side.

The smell of her, the same petalwood soap she’d used when he was a child.

Understanding tore through him, hotter than the blade of a lightsaber. “No!” He sat up, scrambled back from her. “No! You can’t!” Her hand fell away from and she did not reach to close the distance between them. “What I’ve done is unforgivable!”

Her last words to him--her last words--were a whisper on the wind. “May the Force be with you.”

The mist and spray of a low-breaking wave rolled over the Death Star. When it washed away, leaving him coughing and sputtering, only Leia’s sodden cloak remained in the place where she had knelt.

He lunged for it, stopping the sea from reclaiming its prize, and clutched it, buried his face in it. The petalwood scent was gone, only salt and seaweed left behind. “You can’t!” he raged. “You can’t do this to me!”

But she could, and she _had_ , and there was nothing of her left to hear him.

Someone else was, though. A glimmer of blue moved in his periphery. His shoulders tensed but he’d lost his lightsaber in the fall, had no other defenses left to turn against his uncle’s ghost.

But it wasn’t Luke’s voice that spoke to him now: “I don’t believe she _did_ forgive you.”

He whirled, sodden cape whipping around. He didn’t know the man whose ghost stood before him. He dressed like Luke always had, draped in dull brown robes; he was younger, though, and more handsome. Something in the eyes reminded him of Luke, though--he inhaled sharply with realization.

The ghost of Anakin Skywalker gave him half a smile, and he didn’t know how could have failed to see his mother in that face before. “She never forgave me, either,” Anakin said. “She never let me speak to her, like your uncle did. You and I both committed atrocities. So many lives taken, and many more broken.” He settled to a seat on an outcropping of the wreckage, robes shimmering blue where they spread over twisted metal. “There are some things that pass beyond forgiveness. There are some things that should never be forgotten.”

His voice hitched. “Why are you here?”

“Have you forgotten?” Anakin raised his eyebrows. “You promised, once, that you would finished what I started.”

“What you--” He staggered to his feet, still reeling. His mother’s cloak dangled from his fingers. “You were building an Empire.”

“The Empire was built already.” Anakin shrugged. “What I started, and couldn’t finish, was tearing it down. You’re still living in the foundations, building new heights over top of them.”

“No … that’s not …” History revised itself in front of his eyes. He licked his lips. “You were stronger than the Emperor.”

“Not strong enough to survive him. Dying was the easiest thing I’ve ever done.” He shook his head, frowning out over the remains of the Death Star that spread all around them both. “It wasn’t enough. Had I lived a hundred years, it never would have been enough.” He focused in shrewdly on his grandson’s face. “It will never be enough for you, either. It still must be done. Are you strong enough to do it?”

“I--” His breath hitched. “I never thought I’d have to do it alone. I thought--I thought, if _she_ was as alone as I was--”

“Ben.” He looked up, at the sound of that name, recoiling. But Anakin didn’t wield it like a weapon against him. “No one can do the work for you,” he said. “But you’re not alone, either.” He smiled sadly. “It’s time to go now.”

“No--wait!” Ben stepped toward him, but he was gone, like a trick of the light.

A blaster bolt whined through the space he had been.

* * *

“It’s him!” Finn steadied his aim with the help of his off hand, and leveled a second shot Ren’s way. “Come on, Poe! You come around on his other side.”

He jumped forward without waiting for Poe’s confirmation. On one hip, he slid down the sloping side of the Death Star as Ren backed up, looking wildly around like a cornered animal. He had no lightsaber, and no blaster as far as Finn could see; only the Force. Finn had gone up against him with more than just _that_ once before and survived, however narrowly.  
He landed on his feet, already running at Ren, already firing.

With a wave of his hand, Ren deflected the blaster shots and flung a wet wad of clothing into Finn’s face. By the time he peeled it clear, Ren was out of sight.

But Poe was not. He was bending down, retrieving the cloth that Finn had just cast aside. “Which way did he go?” Finn demanded.

Poe said nothing, only stood and let the cloth fall open to its full length. It was a cape, made for someone far shorter than either of them or Ren. The cut of its collar and the shape of its hang offered Finn a faint familiarity, but nothing he could place. 

He also didn’t know why Poe was staring at it that way. He gestured with his blaster. “You having a moment here, man?”

“It’s hers.” The cloak dripped on Poe’s boots; they were already wet anyway. “It’s Leia’s.”

“Leia?” Finn spun in a circle, looking around. “She’s here?”

“I …” Poe’s fists closed on the cloak. “No. I don’t think she is.”

Finn shook his head, trying to understand. He turned in a slow circle, taking in the open sky, the two transports now trading fire in the air over what had been Company 77’s homes.

The dark smear of blood that streaked the Death Star’s surface.

Kylo Ren’s lightsaber, not lost but abandoned, rocking back and forth by his feet in tandem with the waves that battered the wreckage.

“He--” He squeezed his eyes shut. “She’s dead.” It wasn’t a question. As soon as he said it, he _knew_ it was true. “He killed her?” Both father and mother, a permanent matched set.

But then, where was the body?

“No. I don’t think he did kill her.” Poe’s voice came out hoarse. “I think she died. I think she died to save _him_.”

He let go of the cloak and the wind snapped it away, carrying it out to sea, far beyond their reach.

* * *

The trip back to the Falcon was much slower than the trip out. By the time they hauled themselves back up the ladder onto the ship’s waiting ramp, both men were exhausted, shivering, and once again soaking wet. 

BB-8 waited just above the ramp, holding out towels that looked like they might have seen a previous life as the Falcon’s scrub rags. He burbled worriedly, looking between the two of them. 

“I’m sorry, buddy.” Poe rested his hand briefly on BB-8’s dome, not long enough to do any lasting rust damage. “We didn’t find her.” That was only barely a lie. He scrubbed his face clean; his eyes burned and not just from the sting of seawater. “Time to go home with our tails between our legs.” He raised his voice for the benefit of the cockpit. “All right, Chewie! Let’s go!”

BB-8 rocked back and forth and whistled. Poe rounded on him. “What the hell do you mean, _he wants us to leave without him_?”

* * *

Ben, or Ren, or whoever and whatever he was now, skidded down a too-steep incline and sloshed waist-deep into standing water. He stayed still a moment, waiting for the sharp brief pain of a blaster bolt between the shoulders. Then, panting, wide-eyed, he checked over his shoulder; FN-2187 and Dameron hadn’t followed him.

The blaster bolt would have been easier.

His mother’s ship must be here somewhere. Unless--she hadn’t come in his father’s ship, had she? He couldn’t bear the thought of walking beneath those ceilings again, sitting in those seats and having to feel just how much time had changed both them and him. He blinked seawater from his eyes, and wiped his bare hand across his brow. Even the scabs where the crown had left its mark had been washed away, though he could still feel the thick line of his old scar across his face.

What was it that signaled to him a new presence? A current in the Force, a heavy footfall on the metal ground? He spun, hands up.

It was Chewbacca.

A sodden wookiee was a sight to behold. His wet fur clung to his body, taking away some of his enormous size. Still, he towered over Ben. Only Snoke had ever outmatched him for height. But while Snoke’s size had loomed, had menaced, Chewbacca’s never had. His height wasn’t a threat, it was a pillar that could always be relied on. A low rumble sounded in his throat, a query.

“I didn’t kill her,” Ben blurted. 

Chewbacca’s eyes widened briefly, then his mighty shoulders slumped. He knew. He understood. He had another black mark to set against Ben’s name, as if he needed more than he already had. His mighty arms lifted, and Ben awaited the angry report of a loaded bowcaster.

None came. Chewbacca opened his arms, held them out toward Ben. As if he were a wayward child again, a mischievous freighter brat who’d been scolded for tinkering with the hyperdrive or for swapping the memory cores on R2-D2 and C-3PO. “You can’t,” Ben said, stepping back. “You can’t.”

Chewbacca followed him, followed him back, until he had run out of room and there was nothing but open sea at his heels. “You can’t,” Ben tried one more time, but the words were hollow. Chewbacca rumbled: of course he could, he said, and Ben didn’t _deserve_ this, and Chewbacca would do it anyway. When Chewbacca’s arms went around him, and his mouth filled with the unmistakable scent of wet wookiee, his will gave out. “I can't do this,” he said, into Chewbacca’s shoulder. He had spent so long polishing and protecting his own villainy--without it, what was left? “I don't even know where to begin.”

Chewbacca gave a remonstrating growl, and punctuated his disagreement with a cuff to the side of Ben’s head. He could, he averred, think of _one_ likely place.


	25. Chapter 25

When the Falcon touched down on Yavin 4, the old base looked as empty as the ship felt.

Poe emerged from the ship ahead of Finn, looking around. It had been a quiet flight back. There hadn’t been much to say. What was there to say, when _goodbye_ had been so thoroughly and repeatedly taken off the table?

A lonely figured emerged from the open doors of the base, then came loping toward them. It was Rose, of course. With her hair pulled severely back and her oil-stained jumpsuit exchanged for a crisp-pressed uniform, Finn barely recognized her at first. But as she bounded across the yard, her face split in a familiar grin. In spite of himself, in spite of the situation, Finn couldn’t help but smile back.

“You’re back!” she cried, and threw her arms around him--then immediately pulled back, embarrassed. At a more stately pace, R2-D2 and C-3PO pulled up behind her. “We got your message! The navigators are working on a hyperspace path to Exegol as we speak.” 

“Message?” Finn didn’t let her pull all the way away. “Rey. Rey told you how to find it?”

“Well, yeah, she--” The brightness of her smile dimmed as she looked between Finn and Poe’s faces. “Where _is_ she? And where’s Chewbacca?”

Finn took her by the arm, which killed her smile entirely. “They’re gone, Rose. We don’t know where either of them went. And--” He took a deep, shaky breath. “They’re not the only ones.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“It’s Leia.” Poe hadn’t meant to speak so tersely. He dropped his gaze and spoke quickly, trying to soften the blow--an impossible task, however gently it was offered. _She’s gone_ , he meant to say, but the euphemism curdled in his mouth. “Leia’s dead.”

“What?” Rose looked to Finn for denial but got only silent confirmation instead. “No!”

“Are you certain, sir?” C-3PO tottered toward Poe. His face and body hadn’t been molded for expression but there was a sadness to his voice that no engineer could have coded in. BB-8 rolled forward, burbling and making solicitous laps around the older droids. “Princess Leia is truly gone?”

“I’m so sorry, 3PO.” Poe put his hand on the droid’s golden shoulder. “I know you’ve been with her a long time.”

“We droids are, for better or worse, built to endure. It is our nature, sir, to serve many masters, and to outlive them.” C-3PO looked down at R2, who whistled, low and mournful. “And yet despite my design, sir, I find that I miss my friends. Very much indeed.” 

Finn pulled back from Rose a little way, his hands on her elbows. “Where is everyone else? Did something happen while we were gone?”

“N-no.” She dried her eyes on the corner of her sleeve. “Our fleet is fine. I sent them out.”

“Sent them where?” Finn asked. “You didn’t send them on to find Ren’s fleet without us!” 

“Of course not!” She squared her shoulders, every inch the Resistance leader now. He let go of her arms. “They’re going to get help. Collecting a new fleet of our own. We can’t do this alone.”

“Maybe we can’t do this at _all_.” They both looked at Poe in surprise. He turned away and shuffled out into the yard, out from the Falcon’s shadow. He took a deep breath, taking in Yavin’s heavy wet air, trying to remember what coming home felt like--because this wasn’t it. “How many ships do you really think you can recruit? Twenty? Fifty? Maybe we need to tell this fleet of yours to stay gone. Scatter past the Outer Rim. Into the unknown regions, the Broken Void. Somewhere the First Order can’t reach.”

Finn edged toward him. “We’re not giving up now.”

“Why not? Rey already cut out on us!” Poe rounded on him. “And what’s _left_ to give up? If we can’t stop this fleet of theirs before it launches then what was it all for? Paige. Holdo. Skywalker. Leia.” He scrubbed his hand over his face. “I can’t hold this thing together but at least I can make sure they didn’t die for nothing. I’m not Leia--”

“Poe.” Finn yanked his sleeve. “No one is _asking_ you to be!”

That stopped him short. “I’m not--”

“No, listen.” Rose shook a finger in his face. “You’re not Leia. I’m not Leia--believe me, I know.” Tears, stoically held back until now, spilled over the corners of her eyes and down her cheeks. She dragged her sleeve across her face. “We _know_ who we’re not. We were always going to have to figure out who we _are_.”

“This is our war now.” Finn put a steadying hand on her back. “We’re the only ones who can fight it. I don’t know what happened to Rey out there. But at least she’s given us a chance.” Neither Poe nor Rose resisted being gathered up into an embrace. Poe’s fist knotted in Finn’s jacket, while Rose soaked the front of his shirt with tears. Beside them, 3PO quietly laid a hand on R2’s dome. “And we’re going to take it.”

Their moment of silence shattered at the sound of ship engines. Rose pulled back first, scanning the skies for the new arrival. Her face lit up at the sight of the antiquated transport alighting beside the Falcon. 

Jannah and Zorii strolled down the ramp first. Resolve burned bright in Jannah’s face, and at her back the remainder of Company 77 marched shoulder-to-shoulder. “Look!” Rose cried, her voice breaking. She went running to meet them. “Our first recruits!”

* * *

There was one place in the galaxy where Rey had felt sure in herself. Where she had known--or thought she had--who she was and who she might yet be.

The island’s caretakers peeped out of windows, muttering and shaking their heads, when a TIE fighter touched down on Ahch-To. One of them shooed the others aside to shutter the windows and slam the bolt into place. None of _that_ kind of trouble, she clucked at her fellow sisters as she ushers them back to work, not today, thank you.

Rey was barely aware of their presence as her boots struck the island’s stony soil. She took a few steps forward, groping for the familiar peace and purpose she must have left behind when she put her back to this place. 

Neither peace nor purpose was forthcoming. Rey tottered, and sank to her knees. Her palms pressed flat against the dirt, leaving a faint imprint. A sob heaved up out of her.

“Rey.”

She startled at the voice. She recognized it, and yet she knew that its owner should be on the other side of death’s door. “Master Skywalker?”

She sat back on her haunches. The great Jedi stood before her, hands clasped. Through him, and the blue shimmer that clung to him, she could see the dim outline of the caretakers’ houses and the curve of the hill. He was here, and at the same time he was not. He said nothing. Was it death that had put this new distance in his eyes? Or did he already know what she’d done? She stifled another sob. She couldn’t bear to tell him what had driven her here; couldn’t bear if he already knew. “I’ve done something horrible.”

“You’ll do what you must do, in the end.”

The words should have lent her confidence, but instead they only bled away what little she had left. The voice was Master Skywalker’s, but hollowed out of all human emotion. Was this what remained of a Jedi after death? “I’ve done all I can. Maybe I’ve done too much.”

“You have not.” His lips barely stirred with the words--or was that just a trick of the light? “The work is unfinished.”

“You mean the fleet.” Her head bowed. “The Resistance will see to that. I’ve told them where to find it. They don’t need me for that. They have fighters, leaders--that’s not what I am.”

“There is a presence on Exegol.” His flat tone sent a shiver through Rey. “A nexus of the dark side. The pattern is loosening. It is you who must go and set things right, once and for all.”

“You’re not making any sense.” Helplessly, she shook her head. “Please. I don’t understand.”

“Rey?”

That was Master Skywalker’s voice again--but it didn’t issue from the spirit in front of her. She spun. Her old teacher stood behind her, too, the same blue aura emanating from him. There was a sharp slump to his shoulders, as if in death he’d somehow continued to age. “Rey. That’s not me.”

“This form is unsatisfactory to you. There are others.” As Rey looked back, doubting her sanity as well as the report of her eyes, the first Skywalker shifted. For a moment, it shaped the features of Leia Organa, then discarded that too to settle on Han Solo. “Does this comfort you more? All things are gathered here, at their end.”

“What are you?” Rey gasped, but when she looked with her mind’s eyes as well as her body’s, she could see clearly: a locus of energy, a cynosure of life and potentiation, barely contained by the shell it occupied. It was a manifestation of the light side of the Force. She knew _what_ it was, but not _why_ ; she changed her question. “What do you want from me?”

“There must be a reckoning. And you will be the vessel of our victory.”

Rey and Luke--the real Luke--exchanged glances. “Tell me what I need to do,” she said.

“Rey,” said Luke, but the Force-spirit overrode him: “You will go to Exegol. Through you, our power will be made incarnate.” Rey’s heart beat faster. “The dark side will be inundated and overwhelmed. Our final victory will be made possible, by your sacrifice.”

That last word cast a spell of silence over all three. Only the wind, sighing off the waves, made a sound. “What kind of _sacrifice_?” Luke asked first.

“Without you, darkness may overcome.” The Force-spirit did not look at him. It addressed Rey directly. “But with your life, all other lives in the galaxy will be redeemed. A future free of suffering is ensured.”

Rey saw spots, and remembered to breathe. “Master Skywalker,” she said. “It is a small price to pay.”

“Rey, no.” Luke put himself between her and the manifestation. “No one can ask that of you.”

“But if I could defeat the dark side …” Rey wrapped her arms around herself. She tried not to think that no one else would ever hold her this way now. She tried to embrace the comfort of solitude, and failed. “I wanted to come somewhere I’d felt safe before. But ... I should never have come here in the first place. I could never have been a Jedi.” She swallowed hard. Saying the words aloud, she’d hoped they would ring false. She’d hoped to hear Luke deny them. Instead, by giving these thoughts voice, she’d made them real. “There is a darkness in me.”

“There’s darkness in everyone.” Luke spoke firmly, gently. “In me. Even more so, in my sister. She learned to master anger, in time. We all must learn to let the light shine bright enough to chase away the dark. You can, too.”

Could she? From here, she didn’t think so. But she could surrender herself to the light side entirely, and let its life and power consume her before a stray spark ever lit an unstoppable, deadly anger in her. She proved herself stronger than Kylo Ren. What terrible things might _she_ bring to bear, if she caught fire in the dark side? Her eyes shone, but she did not let tears spill over for fear they might quench the decision already burning inside her. “Thank you, Master Skywalker. For all you’ve done for me.”

“Rey, please--”

She stepped away from him, stumbling at first, then breaking into a full run. The TIE fighter’s cockpit closed over her, sealing her into this trajectory.

She only hoped she could beat the Resistance fleet to Exegol, and end the threat of the dark side before any of them suffered further harm.


	26. Chapter 26

There weren’t that many more of them here to give a speech to than there had been on Crait.

Poe’s throat was dry as he looked out over their faces. They were supposed to be sharing a moment of silence in memory of their lost general. But how could a moment ever be enough? He stretched the time longer by cramming it full of dread for what was to come.

He couldn’t be the kind of leader Leia had been and he didn’t know if the kind of leader he _was_ would be the right one. But here were these people gathered, heads bowed, hands or claws clasped. It felt like Crait all over again but the words he’d said there fled him now, and anyway they would never have held the same power a second time around.

Logically, he _knew_ that there was more to the Resistance now than what he could see here, dispensed to the corners of the galaxy. But in his gut, it felt as if only the few gathered in front of him were real. He swallowed, and reconsidered the necessity of speechifying right here and now. They all knew they were about to hop into ships and hare off for Exegol to get shot at and shoot right back. What else need be said? Something that might take their minds off the fact that he might be about to send a whole lot more of them to their deaths?

If Rey had thought they had a shot, she’d still be here with them.

BB-8 chirped encouragement, and Poe ventured out along a safe starting path, a statement of fact. “There are some things,” he said, raising his voice to reach, “that are too big to do alone.” 

His voice carried more than he’d expected, in the big empty base. He reached up, putting his hand on the familiar bulk of his X-wing. At least he still had his ship beside him. A sturdy ship, a couple of good friends at his back; wars had been won with less. “The First Order has done a good job convincing us we’re alone. And not just us.” He leaned into the X-wing, putting his weight on his hand. “We called for help once before and no one came. Because they believed, alone, they were too small. Too few to do any good.

“But that’s a lie that they sold us, and that we bought.” He nodded at Rose. “Luckily for us, not everyone paid into it. There is _no one_ too small to make a difference. There’s no number too few to matter.”

Jannah piped up, raising her bow in her fist. “When the Force is with us,” she shouted, “we’re as numerous as the stars!”

“Settle down,” Zorii muttered. “Save it for the fight.”

“We’ve made mistakes in the past,” Poe went on, fumbling his way forward into uncomfortable honesty. “I’ve made mistakes. I’ll own that. But I won’t let it define us. This isn’t D’Qar. This isn’t Crait.” It wasn’t--was it? “We aren’t just shouting into the void and hoping someone answers.” He met eyes across the room. Connix. Jannah. Zorii’s expressionless helmet. “We have a plan. And we’re not begging for help. We’re holding out our hand and saying, stand beside us. Alone, every system will fail. But we’re not alone. We’ll stand stronger because we’ll stand together. A galaxy united. We have a plan, and we have a purpose.”

When he paused for breath, they broke out in cheering. Finn clapped him on the back. “All that complaining about how you didn’t know what you were gonna say.” He nodded out at the crowd that had already begun to disperse to waiting ships. “You forgot something, though.” He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted: “May the Force be with us!”

The cry came back to him, splintered across a few dozen voices but still strong: _may the Force be with us!_ The words echoed off the old stones of Yavin 4’s temple, making the little group sound five times as big. Finn grinned at Poe as he and Rose moved off toward the Falcon, trailing R2 and C-3PO in their wake. “See you in the sky, general.”

“Yeah.” Poe lingered a while, as ships took to the air. For a moment, he was the only person left on the floor in the hangar. He looked across empty consoles, silent screens, and tried not to see ghosts there. “We don’t have to do this alone,” he said, to himself this time. 

He climbed into his X-wing. The course Rey had set for them was already waiting, loaded into the shipboard navigational system. “Take us there, BB-8.”

* * *

It didn’t feel quite right, to step aboard the Falcon without Rey or Chewie or even Poe. She wasn’t much of a flagship, fine old thing that she was, Poe had said, and he could do more behind the yoke of an X-wing anyway. Still, Finn settled tentatively into the pilot’s seat. Rose sat beside him, already halfway through the pre-flight rundown. “So this is really it,” she said, not looking up from the console.

“So it is.” Finn let his hand rest on the ship’s controls. They were a comfortable size, even if he wasn’t exactly a comfortable pilot. “We’re going to do this.”

“Yeah. We are.” They glanced at each other, exchanging tight-lipped smiles.

“If we aren’t successful today,” piped up C-3PO, from just behind them, “it gives me some comfort to know that I will perish in familiar surroundings, in the company of my dear friends.” R2 rudely blatted his opinion of that line of thinking. “Well! And in _your_ company as well, R2.”

“You’ve survived a lot of battles in your time, 3PO,” Rose said. “It’s not too late to get out. We won’t think any less of you.”

“No! Oh, no, not at all. As General Dameron said, we all have our purpose.” 3PO bent slightly, his best approximation of a bow. “I should like to think that mine is to be present, where I can, to observe history. And perhaps, one day, to pass it on.”

How absurd, to be envious of a droid. And yet Finn wished he had half as strong a sense of his own purpose as 3PO did. He still felt like he must have a part to play, a reason he’d been called here. Maybe it was just to be another cog in the great, interconnected machine that was the Resistance? It would have been easier, to just know.

The Force, however, could be less than forthcoming on these matters. “T minus two,” he announced, and the Falcon’s engines sang to life behind him. One last great fight. The fate of the galaxy at stake. That had to be purpose enough; looking for more was just greedy, in the grand scheme of it.


	27. Chapter 27

The planet of Exegol, blue-swathed in ion storms and dimly shining, took up too much of Ben Solo’s sky.

Behind him, hunched over in the low headspace of Ben’s mother’s shuttle, Chewbacca rumbled gently in support.

“Yes. I know what to do.” He seemed to keep finding himself in situations where he _knew_ what to do, and dreaded it anyway. How could some people make doing the right thing look so effortless? Did Rey have a compass at the heart of her that always pointed true north? Had his mother had the same? Had he been born with one, and broken it somewhere along the way? It wasn’t _fair_ \--

Chewbacca growled again, unwittingly interrupting Ben’s self-recriminating spiral. Recovering, he shook his head. “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you can’t join me. It’s not safe. It would give us away immediately.”

For a moment, Chewbacca considered this. Then he made another yowling suggestion.

Ben’s lips twisted, a smile that had grown used to being a sneer. “No. Not even with the old ‘wookiee prisoner’ routine. Just stay here. No one will dare trespass on my personal vessel.”

The shuttle slid across the outer layer of the planet’s crackling atmosphere. The dagger-shape of a Star Destroyer cut across Ben’s view. He unclenched his jaw, made himself breathe evenly.

It had always been a performance for him. This was no different except in terms of stakes.

The Force brushed up against the edges of his awareness, snagging his attention from where it had wrapped around his plans for the immediate future. He looked aside from the Star Destroyer, frowning, trying to scry what could not be seen. “She’s here too,” he said.

Chewie stood up straight, bashing his head against the ceiling. Captured, he wanted to know?

“No. No, I don’t think so.” He turned his gaze back on the planet, which stared sightlessly back at him. “She’s down there.”

She had gone down to the planet, alone, unknowing what she would find there. She was hardly as unprepared to face the Builder as a cocky collection of First Order officers … but the Builder was still beyond anything she might have expected.

“We should follow her. She doesn’t know what’s waiting for her down there--”

The comm crackled. “Supreme Leader, we have Bay 3-alpha cleared for your arrival.” A bay door yawned in the side of the Star Destroyer and a guidance tractor beam locked onto the shuttle, drawing it inexorably onward.

Ben could still override it. But would doing so tip off his officers that something had shifted? He cleared his throat. “Docking sequence initiated,” he responded, and choked off a reflexive _thank you_ before it could damn him.

* * *

At the head of a phalanx of stormtroopers, flanked by a pair of black-caped captains, Hux stood waiting at the hangar’s entrance. “Supreme Leader,” he said crisply, as Ben--as Kylo Ren, he tried to remember, seeking to recapture the strained set of his jaw, the cut of his eyes--strode down out of the shuttle. “I’m pleased to report that preparations have proceeded apace in your absence. The navigational beacon is complete. Staffing preparedness is green-lit across the board. Upon your arrival, I’ve already given the order to mobilize. You need only name the destination and we will launch the battle to end all battles forever.” There was that rat-lipped smile again. His eyes flicked to Ben’s belt. “Where is your lightsaber, Supreme Leader?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Ben’s hand went to the empty spot against his hip: an omission of weakness. He let his arm fall again. He needed to maintain control of the situation. He needed _time._ He could still get down to Exegol’s surface if he played this carefully. “Countermand the fleet’s mobilization. I’m--not fully prepared yet.”

“Ah.” Hux nodded understandingly. “Fortunately-- _I am_.” His head didn’t move, but his eyes slanted sideways.

A blaster screamed. Ben spun, knocking the bolt aside with a flick of the Force. It rebounded off thin air and cratered the armor of the trooper who’d fired it.

He missed the second bolt entirely. It punched him in the side and knocked him flat on his back. He looked up to see Hux, holding a smoking blaster pistol. Hux smirked. “Long live the Supreme Leader,” he said. He spun neatly on one heel and walked out of the hangar as the rest of the squad opened fire on Ben.

* * *

Rey’s foot touched tentatively down onto Exegol’s stony surface, as if the very planet itself might poison her purpose, her resolve.

Nothing happened. She hopped the rest of the way down from her stolen TIE and took a few more halting steps. Blue static discharged between her boots and the ground. If she tilted her head back, she could see the innumerable ships of the First Order’s fleet. Faint lines of lightning crackled from hull to hull here and there, not so different from the electricity that snapped beneath her feet except in terms of scale. Its size defied understanding, refused to be made comprehensible.

And that was the fleet that she’d asked her friends to come and fight while she’d fled. Shame flushed her face. She didn’t push the guilt aside, but confronted it: guilt was part of what had carried her here. “There’s something here,” she said aloud. Her words rang oddly in her own ears, empty of resonance in the planet’s thin air. Something was there--but what? Something not only dark, but also unnatural. The same presence that had drawn her to the planet’s surface, rather than keeping her in the skies to join the Resistance fleet that she prayed was inbound. A twisted knot in the Force’s gentle pattern. It reminded her, incongruously, of the manifestation of the light side that had spoken to her with the voices and faces of her dead mentors. This was the nexus of the power, a crackling energy potential that had somehow given rise to the impossible fleet still nestled in the storm-riddled atmosphere above. 

If she could untie that knot, if she could cut it--

A groaning sound snatched her attention. An earthquake? She took a wide stance to keep her balance, but the ground had only shaken once. She turned, seeking explanation.  
The TIE fighter had been swallowed by … what was _that_? A cloud? A cloud didn’t move with such purpose. A cloud wouldn’t have been _unmaking_ her ship, chewing holes into the hull and gnawing away at the plastiglass of its wings. As she watched in horror, metal groaned and the lefthand wing gave way, bringing the TIE crashing down. Before she could react, the TIE fighter had disintegrated into only so much gray dust. Soon that, too, swirled away on the invisible drift of the gray cloud.

The cloud pulsed once, and surged toward Rey.

She screamed as it flowed over her. At the edges of her, a--a negative energy wicked away at her being, at her very life. It was of the Force and yet at the same time it was the Force’s antithesis, seeking not balance but overwhelming darkness. An unmaking: of Rey, yes. And of everything else. A galaxy at peace, but only because broken atoms did not wage war.

The cloud broke through her skin here and there: where her collarbone pressed too shallow through the flesh, at the scabs of her battle-scraped knuckles. Pressing deeper. Taking her apart as easily as it had her ship. She waited for the light side to fill her, to empty her out and make of her a vessel, as it had promised. But it was only her, in her frail and fast-decaying body; it was only her, alone and awash in the vast storm of the dark side’s power.

It was too much. It was too terrible. 

If she lay down now, she wouldn’t have to worry anymore.

 _No._ A spark kindled inside her. Of determination.

But not her own.

A door, once closed, could be reopened, if its lock was no longer carefully maintained.

 _Get up._ That was Ben Solo’s voice in her head. She looked up, through the cloud, and saw him as if he stood on Exegol with her. She had killed him, but she didn’t question his appearance here and now--so many stranger things had happened since then. He was beset, fending off adversaries invisible to Rey. A blaster burn smoked on his side; she couldn’t tell if it had only marked his armor or if it went deeper. _You can’t give up already. Pathetic._

“How?” she asked. This thing that sought to consume her was too powerful. Its nature was incomprehensible.

 _Get out of there._ Ben panted, ducking low, then rising up to slam against something or someone Rey couldn’t see. _Just wait. I can help you--_

“I don’t understand,” Rey gasped, barely more than a whisper. “Why would you help me? What do you want?”

 _You stupid child! Is_ this _how you want to die?_

The familiar spike of his anger triggered her own in response. Rey shoved outward in the Force, as hard as she could, a scream dying in her throat. The cloud exploded outward, away from her.

In the space it had vacated, she was left alone. She fought to control her breathing but her heartbeat pounded in her temples. The TIE fighter was gone. She was trapped here now.

There was nothing for it but to go on. There was nothing to do except finish what she’d started.

Beneath Exegol’s surface, something terrible waited for her.

 _Rey_ , Ben shouted after her. Asking her to wait. The one thing she couldn’t, wouldn’t, do.

She went.


	28. Chapter 28

As the Resistance fleet dropped out of hyperspace, Poe got his first glimpse of the planet of Exegol. It didn’t look like much; bleak, storm-hidden, the crackle of atmospheric discharges mottling its face. “All right, crew,” he called over the comm, “the First Order’s fleet must be in there somewhere. They’re not expecting us so let’s not hang around here knocking on their door.” 

He sized up the situation and laid out the best defensive arrangement he could picture against an unseen foe. “Snubfighter wings four, five, and six, on me; cruisers follow in staggered wedge formation. Remaining fighters, you’re our rear guard.”

He flipped the comm off. As he guided his X-wing down toward the planet, he eyed the empty starfield over his head. No last-minute cavalcade arriving to save the day--not yet, at leats. “C’mon, guys,” he muttered. “It’s just a miracle we’re asking of you here.”

Aboard the Falcon, Finn and Rose squeezed hands once before Finn guided the ship in alongside the other cruisers. “Comms might get messy once we cross into those ion storms,” Rose advised, over the comm, as Finn sat back, staring into space. “Stay close, everybody. If we--”

“Rey’s down there.” Finn blinked, snapping out of his brief trance. He and Rose stared at each other, neither one knowing what this revelation signified. 

“She’s here?” Poe’s voice crackled. “Are you sure? Are you picking up any signal from her?”

“No. But I’m sure.” A tentative smile crowded the worry off Finn’s face. “It’s her.”

Over the comm, a mixture of voices erupted: cheering; excited, anxious chatter. “Clear the comm!” Poe ordered sternly, but he was smiling too. “Let’s bring the fight to her, then.”

As one, the three wings of snubfighters cut beneath the outer layer of the atmosphere. On the other side--Poe’s smile collapsed.

BB-8 chirped a worried assessment of the situation. “Yeah, buddy, I know it’s a lot. I just wish you hadn’t told me exactly how many.” Poe had never seen so many ships before, not in his whole life put together, let alone in one place at one time. They couldn’t all be functional. They couldn’t all be staffed! “Strafing run on the nearest cluster formation,” he told his squadron. As if the puny firepower they’d brought could be enough to take this fleet head-on. But if not now, when? If not them, then who? “On me! Now!” 

X-wings and Y-wings cruised low over the surface of the closest Star Destroyers, skimming close to avoid the aim of counterfire cannons. If they could get to the bridge--if they moved fast enough to take these out before they could scramble TIEs--

One of the three Star Destroyers’ bridges erupted in flame and collapsed in on itself. The other two initiated maneuvers as the snubfighter squadrons swept past. “Back around for another run,” Poe ordered, “and look sharp. Odds are they’ll have defensive fire on us this time.”

Back, then, toward the slower-moving cruisers. Poe’s targeting array lit up green, delivering volley after volley. No countering fire yet, but--“Heads up!” Poe barked. “We got ventral cannon movement! Wraith Squadron, they’re lighting you up!”

The least damaged Star Destroyer’s ventral cannon tracked the lead ship of Wraith Squadron. Even as Wraith Leader led her squad into defensive maneuvers, fire leapt from the cannon’s maw.

Not just a single stream of blaster fire. Blinding red light sprayed wide and deep, not a bolt of energy but a cone. After a moment, it crackled and died away.

Only two Wraith fighters remained. The rest had been simply erased in that one terrible blow.

Poe’s mouth was dry. “Fighters and cruisers: constellation formation! Spread out, spread out! We can’t let them take out us out all at once.” 

The comm crackled with a single muffled affirmative response. Anything else that had been said dissolved in the background noise. “The ion storms,” Poe cursed. Maybe if he led, the others would understand, and follow. He peeled away from the Destroyers and in fits and starts, the others in his wing broke away too, singly and in pairs.

But the cruisers were still incoming and Poe had no way to warn them.

Part of him wanted to pull off a Holdo maneuver. One last grand, glorious gesture--but no. Every ship they had left was precious now, and couldn’t be wasted taking out a single Star Destroyer. The First Order had _more_ Destroyers than the Resistance had fighters now, a numerical fact that Poe’s brain didn’t want to accept.

It was a waiting game now, and a hoping one, and every second that they could hold on had to count for something.

* * *

“Black Squadron? Wraith? Maelstrom? Fighters, do you read?” Finn pounded on the console, as if that would improve on his futile attempt to raise the fighter squadrons on the comm. “Can anyone out there hear me?”

“Sorry, commander.” That wasn’t a fighter; it was Lieutenant Connix, responding from one of the other light cruisers that limped in alongside the Falcon. “Only the cruisers are still in contact. We’ve even lost comms with the rear guard now.”

All across the atmosphere, massive energy bursts from the Star Destroyers raked through the fighters, obliterating any with the misfortune to cluster too close together. At this distance, Finn couldn’t pick out Poe’s black-painted X-wing--if his friend’s ship had even survived these first volleys.

“Finn, look.” Rose pointed at the slow-shifting Star Destroyers. “That formation. I think the First Order’s fleet is lining up to leave the atmosphere.”

“If they clear atmo, they can jump to hyperspace.” Finn threw his headset at the console in frustration. “I don’t understand. How are the First Order’s ships maneuvering in tandem? They shouldn’t be able to talk to each other any better than we can.” 

“With formations that tight, they should be crashing into each other at every turn,” agreed Rose. “Unless--”

She elbowed Finn out of the way. “That structure,” she said, swiping her finger to highlight the display of a distant Star Destroyer. The schematic flickered, and zoomed in. “See? Behind their bridge? That has to be a signal booster. A beacon of some kind?”

“You’re right.” Finn scrutinized the display as he groped for his headset again, holding it up against his ear and mouth. “Cruisers, are you seeing this?”

“It’s _small_ ,” Connix observed. “A snubfighter would be able to take out a target at that size but it’ll be hard for the cruisers to make such a tight shot. There’s no way any of us can maneuver like a fighter can.” 

“We’re not in contact with any snubfighters right now!” Finn ground his teeth. “There has to be a way to take that thing out.”

The comm crackled once more, this time with Jannah’s voice. “ _I_ have an idea.”

* * *

Beneath Exegol’s rocky surface there was only darkness. Rey had her lightsaber, but the blue blade cut out such a thin pocket of light that it felt nearly pointless. She dragged her fingers along the side of the wall to help feel her way forward out of the lightless labyrinth. It wasn’t just against the darkness that the lightsaber now seemed useless, either. Rey was walking into something terrible, armed with little more than her faith in the Force. 

On her next step forward, her footfall echoed, and her fingertips left the wall behind.

“So.” She spun, seeking the source of the voice that spoke to her now, but it came from all around her, echoing, vibrating. This was like no human voice that she’d heard before, nor any alien either. _This_ was the source of the distortion in the Force, and now that she was up close to it, sick horror at its scope and power suffused her. This was a hole in the very underpinnings of the universe, the power of creation set loose from all physical constraints. An unnatural configuration, an impossibility, like a stone that fell up when thrown or oil and water that gladly mixed. It should not be so, yet it _was_ , a construct held together by intricate, artificial scaffolding in the dark side. “This is the last bright hope of the Jedi?” it went on. “We had expected something more.”

She turned again, seeking to scrape some sign, some mark of where the speaker stood, from the all-encompassing shadow. “I’m not a Jedi.”

“Ahh: but you do style yourself as a bringer of hope. An emissary of the light.” There was a humming sound, not of lips pressed together, but almost mechanical in nature. “How will you carry hope away from here, false Jedi, once we have ground your bones to powder and flayed you down to your very atoms?”

Her lightsaber came up warningly. “I--”

Something struck her in the back just as she registered a warning tremor in the Force--too late to dodge, her mind and body disharmonious and out of tune. The weight brought her to her knees and she tumbled head over heels to come up spitting blood. She’d dropped the lightsaber and it extinguished, casting her into pitch blackness.

Again an unseen fist struck her, in the side, in the jaw. She staggered, and stumbled. Just in time: a footstep crunched through the space where she’d been and there was a whiff of air, as from a thrown punch.

_Help me!_ she cried out to the light side, but no answer was forthcoming. Rey exhaled, forcing calmness. The Force was with her, was always there, as much here as anywhere else. Whether or not she became its promised avatar. 

When the next attack came, she was ready. She sank into the comforting rhythms of the Force: push and pull, rise and fall. Sensing the shape of an outthrust arm, she ducked under, and leveraged the shoulder attached to it to leap lightly up and over her attacker. A sidestep: two bodies, neither of them hers, collided solidly together. A twist of her foot and another body fell before her, struggling to rise. 

But there were more. Hands, and claws, more of them now, caught at Rey’s arms, her legs. She swept feet out from under one, flipped another lightly across her back, but there were always more to fill in. Ten, she thought--no, a dozen--no, twenty. There were so many and they weighed her down, living shackles, bearing her to the ground.

She hit hard, teeth raking the inside of her cheek. Blood pooled in the curve of her lip; she spat, and more took its place.

“Piteous creature.” The voice came from close, and yet filled the vast unseen sweep of the room. It wasn’t issuing from one of the bodies pinning Rey down now. “We serve the Risen Skywalker, Vader’s living scion. And you serve _nothing_.” A chill breeze plucked at Rey’s collar--but not just a breeze. As on the planet’s surface, the fabric of her jacket unraveled into nonexistence. The same touch picked at the skin of her face where it ground against the stone of the floor, and a chill ran down her spine. “We are infinite, and you are but one.”

No. She clawed outward in the Force, but the weight of the darkness suffocated her, and she found herself empty-handed. She couldn’t even find Kylo Ren--Ben Solo?--where he’d called to her not long before. Perhaps he was dead now. Again. Her friends were flung even farther, unreachable for distance, and probably distrust too. Hadn’t she turned her back to them first?

She gasped for air, cheek scraping stone. So here she was, well and truly alone: her first and final fear. To be alone was to be stripped of community; of family, biological or found. Of everything that mattered.

If everything that mattered was gone, then there was nothing left to lose.

Let it all go. Let everything go. A Jedi had no attachments. A Jedi was a conduit for the Force, an incarnation of the light side. She was not a Jedi, but she could do this much. There was so little left to let go of.

She understood how, now. Empty of all else, there was room inside her for the light side. Only in hollowing herself out could she serve as a conduit for something much greater than her.

Resolve flared, and grew into a supernova. She let her breath go, not resisting the hands that clawed at her, pressing flatter against the ground. Waiting for the recoil. 

With the Force moving through her, she stood.

Bodies flew back from her. Wetly, they struck the walls, the ceiling; stones groaned, and cracked. Behind Rey, the ceiling caved; she stood still as great chunks of rock fell all around her.

Sickly light spilled in through the ruined ceiling. At the margins of the great chamber, some bodies stirred, movements sluggish and heavy under black robes. Others did not. 

The Force ebbed and shifted around the loss of life. Rey observed distantly, untouched by neither sorrow nor relief. Nothing, no one, grabbed at her again. Steadying herself, she looked up to where the sky broke through the new opening in the ceiling. Not far beyond this room there lay a shipyard, three nascent Star Destroyers lying side by side, rough in detail but taking shape within the gray-black smog that roiled over them.

All around her, the cloud laughed, sending her back into a defensive crouch. “There is some power in you yet. Every Sith needs an apprentice: perhaps you will serve the Risen Skywalker yet.”

Rey lifted a piece of rebar from the floor and struck at the cloud. The makeshift staff impacted the floor, spraying gravel, jarring every bone in her arms. “I will not serve him,” she said. Her words hummed; it was her own voice and it was more than that, too. Inside her skin, she felt feverish, aflame with power that painlessly devoured. “Or you.” 

“If you surrender now,” the cloud counseled, “perhaps the scion might be persuaded to spare your fleet.”

She looked up again, her head tilting with passive curiosity. The massive fleet of Star Destroyers was still over her head, but now she looked closer. Faint lines of green fire cut webs between them, alongside wide arcs of red. 

“It is not mine.” But a chill draft of doubt guttered the conflagration inside her. She scanned the sky but from her perspective, from her great distance, she could not find the Falcon’s unique shape, nor anything so small as an X-wing. A firefight was happening, right now. The Resistance was here. Her friends were here.

And they were dying.

She could stop that. She thrust an arm skyward. The nearest Star Destroyers reeled, struck by the invisible blow; their fire sprayed wide of the tiny Resistance cruisers buzzing around them.

She swept an arm again, but this time the Force did not ride the current of her will. _You are distracted_ , said a voice in her head. The voice of Luke and Han Solo and a hundred more echoes besides. _Your fight is here._

In her distraction, something like a gust of wind slammed into her, knocking her rolling and shattering what remained of her concentration. When she pushed to her feet again, the cloud that had greeted her on her arrival coalesced in front of her once more. This time it condensed farther, taking on the suggestion of a torso, arms, legs. A face, bland and featureless. “You will not take away what we have built,” it said, its voice a snarl, its expression benign. When it spoke, its mouth moved out of sync with its vast, echoing voice. “We have long served the Sith. We will serve a thousand years more. You are sandstone that cannot help but be worn away at the touch of diamond.” 

The light side of the Force churned through Rey, slashing out from her outstretched arm toward the cloud construct. It dissipated, exploding outward like a sun gone nova.

Before Rey could breathe again, though, it swirled back into its mockery of a human shape. Was it smaller this time? Had she done any damage at all? She couldn’t be certain. “Did you think you’d so easily won?” it asked mockingly. “The Force is with you. But you are mortal. We will endure long after you are ash on the wind.”

She attacked again with her would-be staff, slashing with the Force, sweeping away a nebulous arm or a leg, cutting across its torso. Each time the cloud simply re-annealed to itself its missing pieces. Meanwhile, the construct batted her around as if she were a plaything, and one of diminishing interest at that. Her arms burned, her legs grew heavy.

No. She was the light side. She would end this, because no one else could.

She sank deeper into the Force, seeing the pattern embedded within this monstrosity. It was artificial, yes, however masterfully crafted--and vulnerable for that.

What had been made could be unmade. 

Rey breathed in, shallowly. The Force inside her took so much space there was little left for anything else, for air, for fear or despair or righteous certainty. In the light side, bonds were set free, attachments were cast loose.

To unmake was to _simplify_.

She reached out and tugged at the tangled knots that held the thing together.

For the first time in their combat, it recoiled. “What are you doing?” it demanded, and its chorus of voices came out jumbled and disharmonious.

Rey did not smile. There was no joy in what she did now. She reached again.


	29. Chapter 29

“General Hux, sir?” The commlink crackled dimly in an empty, smoke-filled corridor. “Sir, it’s the Resistance fleet. Five of their cruisers are mounting an end-run against the flagship, sir.” 

“Keep your voice down, blast you!” Hux hissed into the comm. He leaned around the corner, searching for a sign of Kylo Ren. The relative safety of the command deck seemed a thousand lightyears away. A dozen stormtroopers in blaster-scored armor littered the floor--and were those energy bolts embedded in some of them? What devilry was this? Ren had always contented himself with the weapon of a Sith. Had he developed an interest in antiquated firearms on his way to Kef Bir? An energy bow, honestly? How _plebeian_. Hux retreated deeper into the cover afforded by the bend in the hallway. “ _Five_ cruisers, you say? Surely the watch officers are able to manage this trifling number while I attend to matters of command?”

“Yes, sir, it’s just that--” A crackle, as of the comm being covered for the duration of a brief argument. “They’re in too close for us to get a clean shot and they’re too big for the anti-snubfighter artillery to break through their shields. We think they may be targeting the communications array--”

A resounding clang shook the ship. “What was _that_?” Hux demanded, forgetting to modulate the volume of his voice.

“Sir, there seems to have been some impact with the enemy cruisers--”

Armor clanged in the hallway behind Hux. The comlink fell out of his hand, forgotten now, as he peered out again to see if one of his men had recovered enough to provide him an escort to safer territory.

An eight-foot-tall wookiee stood in the middle of the hallway. When he saw Hux, he bellowed, and leveled a boltcaster at Hux’s face.

Hux yelped, and fled around the corner. The bowcaster punched a hole in the wall where his face had been a moment before.

* * *

On the surface of the flagship Destroyer, a transport door crashed open, and a cavalcade of hooves rang out against the steel surface.

“This is crazy,” Finn shouted, clinging to the reins of one of Company 77’s orbaks. It was all he could do to hang on with one hand while trying to aim his blaster with the other. If he could take out a few artillery turrets, the fighters might have a better chance later. “I’ve done some crazy things. But this is _crazy_.” 

“The kid is right.” Beside him, Zorii shifted her weight, holding on to Jannah’s waist with one arm. Her blaster aim was better and the nearest turret erupted in a gout of flame as Jannah’s orbak leapt nimbly over a seam in the ship’s skin. Zorii grunted when it crashed back to the deck. “A mounted battle in space?”

“It’s not ‘in space’.” Jannah nudged the orbak with her knees, sending it down the straightaway toward the communication array mounted at the back of the flagship’s bridge. “The air’s thin but this is clearly in-atmosphere.”

“A mounted battle _on spaceship_ ,” Zorii sneered. “Does that sound better?”

Jannah tutted, leaning into the orbak’s back as it swept wide around a hatch in the deck. “You know, I offered you a good luck kiss. It’s not my fault you turned me down.”

Rose, holding tight to another orbak’s reins, fumbled her blaster and nearly dropped it. “I liked fathiers better,” she panted, “all things considered.”

“Just hang on,” Finn called to her, “we’re close!”

“Finn?” That was Poe’s voice, in his ear. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Taking out the communication array.” Finn pressed the earpiece deeper into his ear, trying to weed Poe’s words out from the background noise that threatened to swallow them. “Without it, their fleet won’t be able to coordinate. They’ll be stuck in here with us.” Which wasn’t great news for the Resistance, as the odds currently stood. But better them than the unwitting galaxy-at-large.

Static hissed, and Poe’s voice cut back in and out. “--mistake, there’s not going to be anything left of--My friends, I’m sorry.”

“We’re buying time,” Finn told him. “Help is coming!”

“If they were--to be--they’d be here.”

“We are not giving up yet,” Rose shouted into her headset. “There’s so much left to fight for! If we can just--Finn?”

Finn swayed in his saddle, clutching at the orbak’s mane to keep himself upright. “Rey,” he panted, his head still swimming with the pulse of fear that had stabbed its way into his thoughts. “She’s in trouble.”

Zorii barked a laugh and punctured a hole in the cockpit glass of a TIE fighter that came screaming down on them. It crashed into the Star Destroyer just behind them, making all the orbaks stumble; only one or two lost their footing. “We’re _all_ in trouble, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

There was a noticeable silence over the headset. “Poe,” said Finn. “What are _you_ doing?”

“The usual.” A X-wing peeled itself away from the skirmish and plummeted planetward. Finn finished with him, in unison: “Something stupid.”

“Good luck,” Finn said, long after the ion storm had swallowed the possibility of a response. Then he turned back to the work at hand.

While Finn and Zorii and the rest of Company 77 provided cover, Rose and Jannah laid charges at the base of the communication array. A deployment of stormtroopers had emerged from belowdecks, their mag-charged boots stomping all the louder against the ship’s surface; the orbaks nervously shuffled and stomped, waiting to be rejoined by their riders.

“There!” Rose cried, stepping back from her handiwork. “We’ve got a couple minutes before it blows--we need to get out of here.”

“It’s a big charge,” Jannah agreed, swinging up to her orbak’s back and clinging low to its neck. The beast wove and tossed its head as blaster fire screamed past on all sides. Zorii leveled her blaster pistol and returned fire as she climbed up behind Jannah. “There’s no guarantee what it’ll do to the ship’s structure. Best to be back in the air before then.”

“So let’s ride!” Finn whistled, and the rest of the company mounted up to lead the charge back toward the transport. This time around, he felt marginally more confident in guiding his orbak between stormtrooper squads and artillery fire--or maybe the creature had just gotten better at picking its own way through the danger zone. 

“We did it, Finn,” Rose called to him across the ozone-smoked space between them. “This is going to work.”

“Damn right it is,” he called back to her, clinging to his orbak’s swaying back. But he still had one eye on the failing Resistance fleet overhead and one ear tuned in to the dead silence from the planet down below.

* * *

Exegol’s air was dry and unpleasant to the taste, but breathable. Poe tossed his helmet onto his seat as he climbed out of his X-wing. BB-8 dropped to the ground beside him and followed close at his heels as he took a first few strides--then bumped into him as he stopped. “Where are we going?” Poe groaned. “It’s a whole planet, there’s no way to know where she is.”

What was he _doing_ here? Up in the air, he’d felt a stab of purpose. Pulling a Holdo maneuver was a grand, glorious and, in this instance, ultimately meaningless gesture. If he’d come to the Exegol system to find his death, he would rather it be a small and significant one.

Leia would never have jumped ship in the middle of battle. But … he wasn’t Leia, was he? And pointing his X-wing at Exegol’s surface was the first time he’d felt like he knew what he was doing in months. 

Rolling in an easy circle, BB-8 began to suggest his modest scanning capabilities to try to track down Rey. But his helpful chirp turned into a squawk of dismay. Poe turned to see his X-wing engulfed in a fine-grained mist. As he watched, shocked, the X-wing shuddered and began to wick away into thin air, as if it had been made out of spun sugar instead of steel. “What--?”

The mist shivered, and sped toward him and BB-8.

“ _Run!_ ”

BB-8 didn’t need to be told twice. He clanked over the ground, leaving chunks of paint behind on the stony surface. Just ahead of the cloud’s reach, they crested a low rise--that ended in an abrupt drop-off. Together they skidded over the edge and down the steep slope on the other side, into darkness.

* * *

“Little Jedi.” The makeup of the cloud’s essence vibrated as Rey continued to peel it apart, one strand at a time. “You don’t understand what it is you’re doing.”

“I know enough.” Calm suffused Rey. An inner peace such as she had never known. She picked away another fragment of its being. “It doesn’t matter if I survive. As long as do this first.” She could see how the tangled weave of this monstrosity had been bound into the greater topology of the Force. The light side moved through her and she moved through it, pulling. Changing. Whoever had created this construct had opened a hole in the Force and through it … “I can end the dark side forever.”

_There must be a reckoning_ , the voice had said. She could see that now, could see how to visit it upon the Force. For the first time in what felt like forever, she could see the path forward. If she left her own blood and splintered bones behind on that path, what did that matter, so long as it led to a world without rage and fear and pain?

“End it--and then what?” Half of its face slid away, then reformed, moving a fraction of a second out-of-sync with the remainder. “Will the puppet not question the one who pulls the strings?”

“I’m not a puppet.” She was an avatar, the light side made manifest in a willing recipient: the distorted mirror-image of this construct, that had been unwillingly and unwittingly brought into existence as a physicalized instance of the dark side. Like matter and anti-matter, they would crash together and be annihilated, and the power of that destruction would unravel the very dark side itself. It was a pleasing symmetry, Rey observed distantly. Her vision was starting to blacken around the edges; the roar in her ears diminishing to a ringing. “Nothing you say will change what I must do.”

“You don’t see. What is it you seek?” Its multitudinous voice diminished as she tore away another thread of its power. “What is it you desire?”

“A galaxy where no one suffers as I have suffered and seen others suffer.” A particularly troublesome fragment of its design vexed her; she brute-forced her way through it instead of teasing it gently apart. The cloud broke in half and fine-grained dust rained to the ground.  
The two pieces pulled together again, robbed of their former scope and size, twisting scraps of darkness no longer trying to hew to the human form. “What is the shape of joy, in a world without suffering? What space is left for life in a world without death?”

_What does that mean?_ Rey asked. The light side answered for her, using her voice. “Your distractions won’t work. This will be finished. The long-foretold ending must be written and balance will be restored.” 

Yes, Rey realized, there could be no stopping, no turning back, now. By unraveling the construct, she had destabilized its underpinnings in the Force itself--like pausing the law of gravity, or altering the addition of two plus two to temporarily equal five. She had her hands deep in the underpinnings of the universe now, and that was an honor and a thrill and a terror all at once. No wonder the very outline of her seemed to strain, with so much inside her. 

If she stopped now, the whole thing would tear apart. But she would tear herself apart instead, and use the structure of the light side that suffused her to fill in the gaps that would remain when the last threads of the dark side had been torn away.

And what would the galaxy look like, on the other side of that?

_You will witness it,_ the light side consoled her, _in a way; after you achieve its completion, through our eyes, united in death with all life._

It would be worth it. Wouldn’t it? It had to be. She had to believe that it would be. Or else ...

“ _Rey?_ ”

For a moment she could only wonder how the construct knew her name. Had she surrendered something precious from her mind without realizing it? But the voice did not echo, nor thicken with disdain at the shape of her name. She opened her eyes.

A blaster bolt burned through the center of the Builder’s mass. Rey followed the negative streak it left across her vision back to the hand that had fired it. “Poe?” she gasped. Hadn’t she told him to stay away? He couldn’t be here, not with the construct to contend with, not with the light side reaching its crescendo inside her. She had come here for a reason.

But _he_ must have, too, and she was afraid she knew what it was.

“Go,” she said, her voice resonant in the Force. “I have to do this. I can end the dark side once and for all. But you need to _go_!”

“Oh,” crooned the construct, seizing on her shock and confusion, “is this one yours?” And it swept away from Rey like an outgoing tide.


	30. Chapter 30

The battle, such as it was, carried at last to the command deck.

Scores of dead stormtroopers lay in Ben’s wake. For the rest of his days, he knew he’d wonder how another would have proceeded, how they might have spared life where he stole it. But at last he had Hux pinned down, stripped of his guards, while the rest of the bridge crew cowered at their stations.

“I surrender,” squeaked Hux, scrabbling backward. “Please! I surrender, Supreme Leader, and throw myself upon your goodwill.”

Ben made his way inexorably forward. The bruise in his side ached with every footfall, but at least the armor had spared him the worst of the blaster bolt. He was glad he’d survived long enough to see the look on Hux’s face now. When Hux ran out of room to retreat, flattening his back against a wall pylon, Ben lifted his chin with the muzzle of a blaster he’d seized in the fighting. “You helped quash the mutiny before,” he said. “Explain.”

Hux’s face pinched. “The situation had gotten out of control. There was no defeating you then. So I ingratiated myself to you instead, and you were fool enough to accept that.”

“Why?”

“Why else! To forge a First Order free of your _obsessions_ and your ridiculous mythology.”

Ben nodded. “I see,” he said, and shot Hux under the chin.

The body dropped, smoking, at his feet. He would make peace with that later--or he wouldn’t, and it would gnaw him the rest of his days. Either way, it was done. He let go of the blaster, too, and it bounced once and came to rest on the deck between his feet.

“S-sir?” One of his officers stood, raising her hand in a shaky salute. “The Resistance, er ... _ground_ troops seem to have laid charges on the communication array. If we don’t take measures to--”

“Your counsel will not be required,” Ben snapped. “Tell the fleet to cease fire at once.”

The officer stared at him, her eyes shimmering with nervous, unshed tears. “Supreme Leader--”

“ _Were my orders unclear?_ ”

She dropped back into her seat as if her legs had ceased working. A few keystrokes on her console, and she spoke again with chin trembling, but held high. “It is done, sir.”

“Good. We--” He looked up sharply at the report of artillery fire. Arcs of red-white destruction still slashed the storms all around him. “Why are our ships still firing?”

“I’ve transferred primary communications control to the secondary array aboard the _Peerless_. General Peleck will take control of the new flagship.” Her voice broke as she shouted: “Long live the First Order!”

She would have repeated her cry a second time but for the bands of invisible iron that closed around her throat. Ben squeezed.

Behind him, there was a soft growl. He did not look over his shoulder to see Chewbacca standing in the entryway to the command deck. “Shoot me again if you have to,” he snarled. “You’ve done it before. This time I’ll do what I have to. Her life for thousands more.”

“That’s unfair.” Ben whirled. The deck officer’s feet scraped the floor as she hung, still in his control. But beside Chewbacca stood Luke’s glowing ghost. “We all do what we must.”

Ben shook his head, damp hair whipping his face. “What are you doing here?” he snarled. “Shouldn't you be with _her?_ ”

Luke met his eyes frankly, sadly. “For the moment,” he said, “my concern is the state of my nephew’s soul.”

Ben’s fingers shook. It would be easy, so easy, to destroy the whole deck crew, to dismantle the First Order one life at a time, as he had dismantled Hux’s. The idea of killing them was a whirlpool of dark joy and it sucked away at him, demanding that he give in.

He had killed so many already. What were a few more, if it meant other lives spared?

He looked around, and met the eyes of another crewman--one of his new recruits, a boy of no more than fourteen. The child sat frozen at the navigational array, hands stretched to reach the farthest screens. Ben could see himself reflected in the child’s wide, bright eyes.

“Redemption is a journey,” said Luke. “Take the first small step.”

The deck officer collapsed to the ground, wheezing and gasping, when Ben released her. “You,” Ben said, and pointed to the child operating the nav system. “You will help me find more of--” He couldn’t force out the words _your recruitment class_. The brittle honesty he’d once demanded of his council now came haltingly to him. “Your--the others we took.”

The boy’s eyes darted from Ben to the fallen deck officer. Then to Chewbacca, who grunted encouragement. He slid from his chair. “F-follow me, Supreme Leader,” he squeaked, and Ben didn’t know how to correct him.

* * *

As Finn guided his orbak back into the transport, the Star Destroyer hull beneath them shuddered. “The communication array!” Jannah shouted, pointing.

“Look out, you idiot.” Zorii pushed her down low over the orbak’s neck, covering her with her armored-and-helmeted body just as smoke and burning embers rained down over them and the rest of Company 77. The embers stung and the smoke burned in eyes and noses, but Finn and many of the other riders raised a whoop anyway.

“Before you get carried away congratulating yourselves,” Zorii shouted, “take a look up there.” 

Over Finn’s head, three Star Destroyers moved together in a pincer formation to cut a pair of light cruisers off from the rest of the fleet. Though a few lonely fighters swarmed them, like flies stinging a Hutt, the Destroyers locked down the cruisers’ ability to maneuver. One well-placed firing arc from the lead ship took out both Resistance ships at once.

“It didn’t work.” Rose gaped at the scene unfolding in the sky. The orbak beneath her danced in response to her agitation. “They can’t maneuver that finely on visuals alone. Why didn’t it _work_?”

“They must have transferred communication control. One of these other ships must have its own array.” Jannah grimaced. “Maybe _several_ of them do.”

“Now what?” Rose said. “The fleet is massive. We can’t possibly find every ship with an array, let alone destroy them all. Not before it’s too late. As long as they can talk to each other--we’re doomed.”

 _As long as they can talk to each other …_ Finn slipped off his orbak’s back. “I’ve got a plan,” he told Rose. Despite the terrible gravity of the circumstances, he found himself smiling. It felt so good to know, to finally just _know_ exactly what needed to be done. “But I’m gonna need to get inside this ship.”

She stared at him, for just a moment. Then her hand went to the tool belt strapped around her waist. “I can help with that.”

* * *

BB-8 was terribly, terribly lost.

His radar didn’t work here underground, and it didn’t help that no sensible being had marked or labeled the cavernous, criss-crossing hallways. (An organic. It must have been an organic, for no droid would have been so haphazard about it.)

Poe had gone on ahead, which was fine, BB-8 knew they were here to help Rey and Rey needed the help more than BB-8 needed company bumping along over these rough rocky floors (he _would_ need help later, however, in repairing the damage he was suffering from these travails, oh, they would have to sand him down to bare metal to get these scrapes out)! 

It was really very dark down here and his little light only shone so far ahead. He chirped a tremulous query, but no one answered, not Poe, not Rey. 

He rolled on ahead, searching.


	31. Chapter 31

The flagship had erupted in all-out civil war by the time Ben arrived in the hangar bay.

Stormtroopers fought stormtroopers, officers fought officers, and sometimes the two mixed, to the misfortune of the ship’s unarmored staff. Some were loyal to Hux and the First Order--not knowing their would-be general was already dead; some were loyal to Kylo Ren--not knowing that there was no longer a person who went by that name.

“Stop.” He put up a hand, halting the swarm of children he’d amassed on his path through the ship. The brat from the bridge stood just behind him, his eyes less wide now. He seemed to take a certain amount of nervous pride in being seen at the “Supreme Leader’s” right hand. 

Pride was a swift path to destruction. Ben met Chewbacca’s eyes, where the wookiee brought up the rear, shepherding the youngest and slowest. He’d picked up two of the smallest ones, and there was something truly surreal about seeing miniature First Order uniforms held safely in the wookiee’s massive arms. “We’ll take one of the Razor-class transports,” Be said, pointing to the closest one in the hangar. “You’re all to stay close. If there’s any trouble--”

If was a foolish choice of words. A spray of blaster fire drove Ben back out of the hangar bay as a squad of stormtroopers emerged from behind a TIE docking station. No need to pause and ask which side they might be on. “Stay here,” he ordered. “I’ll handle this.”

He strode out into the line of fire. He had no lightsaber with which to block, but a sweep of his arm diverted the volley sideways, exploding en masse into the tower of TIEs in their station. Burning plastisteel and shards of metal showered down over the advancing troopers, taking out a fraction of their number.

Ben lit into the rest. He had no weapons but the Force and his own size, and he used both to his advantage: crushing the air from lungs, tearing armor apart at the seams. The heat of a blaster bolt stroked his face but, in the Force, with the Force, he had already shifted his weight and the bolt exploded harmlessly behind him. 

Like a lightsaber passing through silk he made his way through the mass of bodies until they were, truly, nothing more than bodies, shrouded in smoke. He paused, coiled, ready for further action. His cape swirled once more and settled under gravity’s tug.

He spun. At the entry to the hangar, dozens of eyes were fastened on him. “What are you waiting for?” he snapped. “Move!”

Chewbacca caught up with him as the children scurried in a half-hearted attempt at strict double-time across the floor to the waiting transport. He rumbled a query, raising a paw but not laying it on Ben’s shoulder.

“I’m fine.” He swept off toward the transport with Chewbacca at his heels. “We need to get down to the planet’s surface. The girl is down there.”

Now Chewbacca did grip his shoulder and pull Ben around to face him. The wookiee had no eyebrows, but if he did, he would have raised them now.

“It’s Rey,” Ben told him. “She’s facing the Builder alone--I’ll explain later. She can’t do it by herself. _I’m_ the only one who can--”

Chewbacca wanted to know: was landing on the planet right now _safe_? He gestured with his free paw to the inside of the transport.

Ben felt his teeth grind, jagged surfaces rubbing roughly together. He forced his jaw to relax. “It will be safe once I’m through with it. I’ll lay down my life, if I need to, to make sure that it is.”

Now Chewbacca’s grip on him tightened fractionally. He leaned in closer. Ben, he suggested, needed to give some thought as to why, exactly, he wanted to be a hero now.

“I’m not trying to ‘be a hero’,” Ben snapped, but of course that was a lie, to Chewbacca and to himself. Vader had wiped the slate clean with one last grand gesture--would history not be as kind to Ben, too, in time, if only he traded his own life now against the enormous debt he had already incurred?

Dying, Chewbacca reminded him, was easy. Everyone did it. Doing the right thing, the thing you didn’t want to have to do, undertaking the responsibilities you’d accrued--that was a great deal harder.

“Dead people,” Ben threw back at him, “can’t make any more mistakes.”

Chewbacca let that sit, waiting on Ben’s decision. That was the worst of it: that even knowing everything Ben had done, even knowing how many lives rested in the balance either way, the old wookiee was still willing to let Ben come around to it on his own. “Fine,” he said. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Fine. Let’s go.”

* * *

It felt strange to walk the halls of a Star Destroyer again.

More than strange, it felt _wrong_. Finn’s heartbeat quickened as if he were just a junior trooper again, peeping around corners to make sure he wouldn’t bump into a captain who would give him garbage duty or send him out for psych reconditioning.

“It’s okay,” said Jannah quietly, bumping him with her elbow. His face must have betrayed some of the thoughts he believed he’d hidden. “I feel the same.”

“This way!” Rose’s shout drew their attention. From a bend in the corridor, she beckoned them frantically. “Based on the diagrams I’ve seen, there should be a comm station at the next junction with--”

The breath punched out of her. A smell arose, ozone and burnt flesh. She crumpled to the floor. A blaster bolt wailed. They all came to Finn at once, inseparable, outside of time, a single screaming moment that stretched out forever.

“ _Rose!_ ” He took off toward her, only to nearly fall over backward at a yank on his collar.

“You wanna die too?” snapped Zorii. “Use your head!”

He panted, looking from her to Jannah. Jannah nodded. “Go. I’ll cover you.”

She strode out ahead, bow out in front of her, lighting up the first stormtrooper to spill around the corner. Finn followed, and Zorii right behind, darting out around the bend to pull Rose into the comparative safety of the wall’s shelter. Two more members of Company 77 flanked Jannah, firing at unseen stormtroopers as Zorii checked the smoking wound on Rose’s side. “Who’d have thought,” she grunted. “A stormtrooper that knows how to shoot.”

Finn laid his fingers on Rose’s forehead. “She’s breathing!”

“Finn?” Her eyelids flickered, then flew open wide. “I’ve gotta get to that junction!” When she tried to sit up, she whined in pain and fell back against Zorii’s shoulder.

“Are you sure?” Finn demanded. She wasn’t too badly injured to keep her from giving him a _look_. That was heartening, at least. “Okay, okay. We’ll get you there.” 

She took his hand and used it to leverage herself to a sit. Zorii slung her arm around Rose’s shoulders and took her the rest of the way up.

“We’re clear here!” Jannah shouted. “Let’s move!”

With Zorii’s help and Finn covering their rear, Rose limped down the hallway. Stormtroopers’ bodies--as well as two members of Company 77--crisscrossed the floor, and they stepped carefully around the dead of both sides.

The junction was more exposed than Finn would have liked, two hallways meeting in a wide X that left them exposed on all four sides. “Blockade formation 7,” Jannah ordered, and Finn found himself instinctively moving alongside Company 77, following movement patterns he thought he’d shed with his white armor. 

Zorii settled Rose in beside the comm station. There wasn’t a seat, but she rested her weight against a ridge in the wall. “It’s just a matter of escalating our permissions,” she muttered to herself. She ripped open the side of the station and frowned inside. “Or--hmm. If I can bypass security checks altogether …” 

She tore a fistful of wires free as another squadron of stormtroopers came around the corner. The troopers started shooting the moment they saw Finn and Company 77, throwing firing discipline completely to the wind. At such a range, their shots mostly clipped the walls, and the Resistance team didn’t get peppered with anything worse than a few sparks. Still … “We’re going to need better cover!” Finn called.

“We’re going to need more than _that_.” Zorii jerked her head in the opposite direction. Behind them, another trooper squad had entered the hallway. While Company 77 exchanged fire with them, the troopers were working on setting up a piece of equipment nearly the size of an orbak. “That’s a riot ram.”

Finn popped off a few shots at the team setting up the ram, but couldn’t get a clean target. “Rose …”

“I’m working!” Finn glanced at her; there was sweat beaded on her brow and her upper lip. “If I had a second pair of hands, I’d work faster, but I don’t.”

Zorii’s shoulder twitched. The pouch on her back popped open and a tiny, bewhiskered head peered out. “Babu got two hands.”

The lines of pain in Rose’s face revised themselves into confusion. “Has he been in there the whole time?”

“Muz chi tul do,” Babu said, clambering down Zorii’s back and waddling over to Rose’s side.

With a glance at Finn--who only shrugged--Rose handed Babu the smallest pair of wirecutters from her tool belt, and he burrowed inside the comm station. “Hold them off,” she said, and essayed a smile. Her dry teeth stuck to her upper lip and turned the smile into a grimace. “We’re going to make this happen.”

He nodded tightly. Blaster held high, he squeezed off another pair of shots. There just wasn’t a good angle for him to hit the stormtroopers behind the riot ram, though. He put his attention back to the ones at the opposite end of the hall, who were advancing steadily over the bodies of their comrades.

That was the thing about stormtroopers, wasn’t it? There were always more of them. The one supply the First Orders’ commanders never seemed to run dry on was that of lives. _Other_ people’s lives.

His arm dropped. His blaster weighed his hand down, impossibly heavy now that he was thinking about who was on the other end of it. He didn’t want to shoot stormtroopers. “Listen,” he shouted, and took a step forward. “Listen! I just want to talk.”

“Get back here, idiot!” Zorii barked. “I can’t shoot _through_ you.”

One or two of the stormtroopers down the hall had lowered their weapons--not dropped them, but lowered them. Finn put his hands up. “Just hear me out, and--”

The riot ram barked.

A sonic pulse rolled down the hallway. Finn spun, putting his hands in front of him as if he could stop the wall of sound. It struck him like a hammer hits a gong and he went spinning down into the black.


	32. Chapter 32

“Finn? _Finn!_ ”

Oh: that was _his_ name, wasn’t it? The voice rang to him from a great distance, as if down a long hallway full of twists and bends. He blinked, and looked around.

A face loomed, close and pale over his. He matched up another name to go along with it: Rose. “Finn,” she repeated, and her mouth was by his ear but her words sounded a thousand miles away. “It’s ready.”

She put something in his hand and his fingers closed around cold metal and plastic. He rolled to his side, looking around. White boots, white-cased legs, moved around them. Bodies were heaped all about too, a few white armored but most bare-armed and bare-faced, not sterile white but brown and amber and all the rainbow colors of flesh. Alive? He thought so, but his entire head seemed to vibrate from within, and it was hard to look at anyone long enough to tell.

“Finn,” Rose begged, lying beside him, shouting across the universe. “You need to talk to them. Hurry.”

Finn looked at the object she had given him. Black and gray, a long cord disappearing under Rose’s arm and into the wall. A comm mike.

Memory punched a hole through the rubble in his brain. He put the comm to his lips. “My name is Finn,” he said, and his own voice echoed back to him from all around. It echoed too, he knew, across the other decks of the ship, across the other ships in the fleet, a message broadcast from him to the entire First Order force sheltered here beneath the ion storms of Exegol. “But some of you may have known me when I was called FN-2187.”

“This one’s awake!” a stormtrooper beside Finn shouted, reaching down for him.

Beside him, Jannah lurched to her feet. With her energy bow she pulled off a quick shot, point blank into the trooper’s neck. She turned, assessing the situation, gripping her bow with pale knuckles. She shook her head as if to clear it, and shouted a rallying cry to her company. They fenced Finn in on all sides, a wall against the tide of troopers closing in.

Finn met Rose’s eyes, half-lidded and glassy though they were. She nodded. He licked his lips, and pressed on. “I was a stormtrooper. I’m not, anymore. But it doesn’t matter who _I_ am. What matters is who _you_ can be.” Rose’s eyes had closed. Finn licked his lips and talked faster. “It’s not always easy, figuring out the right thing to do. Who you actually want to be. I’ve tripped and I’ve stumbled along the way.”

Elsewhere, Ben Solo flinched away from a transport’s speakers. Elsewhere, the officers on the flagship’s deck screamed at their communications staff to _get that infernal noise shut down_.

“And doing the right thing now,” Finn pressed on, and it was so _hard_ to think with his own words magnified and rolling all around him, “it doesn’t paint over the horrible things you’ve already done, when you were thought you didn’t have a choice. But you _do_ have a choice. There’s a better world out there and you can live in it. Be part of it. Help us shut down the comm array so this fleet can’t leave orbit. Help take these ships before they’re turned against the worlds you came from.” He cleared his throat, that had grown suddenly thick. “Stolen children, it’s time to take back what’s ours.”

A boot drilled into Finn’s side. He curled around the bright flash of pain in his ribs. The comm mike went flying out of his hand and skittered across the floor, out of reach. The trooper lifted his foot high for another blow--

With a shout, Rose flung herself forward. In her hand she clutched a screwdriver and she drove it with all her strength into the ankle joint of the stormtrooper’s armor. The trooper fell backwards, cursing in pain, and Rose fell back too, panting, more ashen now than ever.

“Rose …” Nerves flashed angrily when he tried to sit up. The rough pattern of the deck imprinted in his cheek, the side of his forehead, but his head was too heavy to lift. His work was done, his whole life so far driving toward this moment. He found himself looking forward to whatever would come next--there would, he resolved, _be_ a next, there had to be. The splintered ends of he’d-rather-not-imagine-what ground together in his side, but he stretched out a hand and curled his fingers around hers. “Don’t be dead,” he begged, and she cracked her eyes open, and she wasn’t. “I think I love you,” he blurted, a smaller confession than he would have liked to offer her, but bright-polished for its truth.

She smiled. “About time, dummy,” her mouth shaped, but there was too little left for him to hear.

But not just because of the ringing in his ears. When he glanced sideways, stormtrooper fire now crossed streams as the squadron turned against itself. Jannah and her people exploited the openings that resulted, wedging themselves between splintered factions of troopers, isolating holdouts and taking them down.

A tiny tap on Finn’s elbow pulled his eyes down. Babu Frik stood between him and Rose, bent nearly double by the weight of the comm mike. “For you,” he said, and held the device out to Finn.

Finn let go of Rose to thumb the mike’s switch. “--fleet for us.” That was the exuberant voice of none other than Lando Calrissian. “Hold out a little longer, friends: the cavalry’s here!”

* * *

If the First Order fleet gathered around Exegol was a mighty constellation, then it was a burgeoning galaxy that now dropped out of hyperspace.

“What is _that_?” demanded the watch officer on what had been Kylo Ren’s flagship. She had already, in a fit of excitement, proclaimed herself the Standing Supreme Leader. As FN-2187’s illicit broadcast rolled through her ship and this swarm of _gnats_ poured through Exegol’s storms, she began to wonder if that decision had been less resourceful than she’d believed and more rash. “I thought we’d already seen the full Resistance force! Where did they get a secondary fleet of this size?”

“It’s _not_ a fleet, ma’am,” said her sensor tech officer, and gestured helplessly at his console. “It’s just … people.”

And so it was. Sleek spice smugglers and antique A-wings. Ships that looked like they’d been cobbled together from a hundred older models, modded-up pleasure-craft, Old Republic diplomatic transports, junkers, light attack craft from the anti-piracy patrols at the galaxy’s rim. Nothing massive, no top-line cruisers or heavy gunships. They had no shipkiller weapons, no extravagant warheads. In size, the most massive of their ships was still minuscule against any vessel of the First Order line.

Their only strength was in their numbers, and this they deployed to its full effect, tearing through the First Order fleet like a plague of hungry locusts.

* * *

Poe was there for a moment, and then he was not, enveloped by the hungry cloud. 

_One life._ Time slowed down and stretched all around her, as the light side spoke inside her head. _Measure that against the entirety of the galaxy. Let go of your anger. Let go of your attachments. You are the thread by which reality will be rebound. Is this not enough for you?_

Of course. Of course. The safety and well-being of trillions had to outweigh that of just one man. Didn’t it? “But …” Rey struggled for understanding. His arrival, in all its iconic absurdity, had knocked her out of alignment with the light side that moved through her, and her perspective had shifted from that of millennia and galaxies down to a very human scope and scale. “I’m not … I don’t … what is a universe without the dark side?”

 _Peace. Justice._ Rey heard these words, and though they went unspoken she understood the mirror-images glinting just behind: _stasis. Silence. Stagnation._

A world without pain was a world where no one learned from their mistakes, and changed things for the better.

A world without anger was one without hope, for what was hope without the outrage that things were not as they should be?

A world without sorrow was a world where you never loved anyone or anything to miss them when they were gone.

“I don’t want this,” she gasped. “This is wrong!”

 _This is what must be. And you are the way forward. With acceptance comes peace._ Rey had made herself open to the Force and it used the window she had left behind to exert itself upon her, bringing her to her knees. More strands of the dark side broke away, at her unwilling touch. _You can give up the darkness that holds you back._

“But I don’t want to!” she cried. Frozen time shattered and, with it, two things inside her broke wide open, refusing to be put aside any longer.

Fear: not just for Poe, though he was bound up inside of that too; a wild teeming nest of fears, of failure, of pain, of a broken Resistance and slain friends, of a universe left broken by the touch of her hand; a braided chain so thick with dread that it refused to be sundered.

And along with it, hope: that this was not the Resistance’s final stand, that the First Order might yet fail. That her friends would live, and fight another day, or enjoy a well-earned peace. 

That light and dark could find a shape in which to twine together and hold a galaxy cradled in between the two.

That one life here might yet be saved.

“My anger is _mine_.” Saying it aloud felt like remembering her own name. This galaxy was filled with lost children, it was constantly at the mercy of the merciless--how could any reasonable soul see that, and not be angry? A new calm settled over Rey, inexorable, full of momentum. She reached out, even as she rolled to her feet, and the construct’s whirling mass stilled. She could see a human shape at the center of it, dropping to hands and knees. Alive. “It is not me and it will not control me and I will not lay it down.” She dragged herself to her feet and flung her arms wide. 

The light side fought her. But that wasn’t right, was it--the light side? No. There was no such thing as light or dark; there were two sides of the same coin, bound together, each impossible without the other. Not light or dark at all, but warp and weft, the two braided beautifully together to make the tapestry into which the galaxy was woven.

The construct’s ebbing power whipped around the room, still desperately trying to pluck Rey out of existence; the bright-burning Force still tried to scrape her out of her own body and make of her a thing of its own purpose. She stopped trying to unweave the construct, binding its threads in a new way instead, closing off the holes that had been worked into the pattern.

There was blood in her eyes and in her mouth. It felt strange, to think of her own body, which had seemed so distant a moment ago. Now, as it failed her, it reminded her again of its pains, its limits. She looked for Poe, and found him leaning into the wind of the construct’s struggle. He was trying to cross the space between him and her, despite the intensity of the heat that must be boiling off her now as the Force consumed her and she subsumed herself into its strength. His face was a mirror: of blood, yes, but also of doubt, an inventory of all the steps that had brought them each here, to this. The lives they had lost, the hearts they couldn’t change. The failures that had defined them. The mistakes that had made them who they were today.

“Rey,” Poe shouted, when he caught her eye. “Stop! You’re burning up!” He beat his fists against the floor when the raging construct knocked him back. “I’m not giving up on you. So _you don’t get to give up on you either._ ”

She smiled, and shook her head. She wasn’t finished yet. The incarnation had been right, when it said things must come to an ending here today. “I’m angry and I’m afraid, too,” she continued, as the construct regrouped and railed around her, as the light side tried to shove her outside the confines of her own body, “for my friends, for every single world that has so much to lose. Because I’m afraid, I protect them. Because I’m angry, I fight for them. If I had understood that sooner--if I had understood myself--”

She wouldn’t have tried to fight a battle for her heart that she could never have won. She wouldn’t have slain someone in anger. She wouldn’t have pushed away the friends who cared about her, to save them from seeing her as she saw herself, and she wouldn’t have turned aside someone who looked at her with more than friendship in his eyes--

How could the Jedi have fought these feelings all the time? How could Rey ever have kept cutting away parts of herself, and expected not to lose anything in the process?

Hope and fear and anger and love, woven incurably together and well creased from years of wear, snapped. Rey took one single step toward Poe.

Through her boot soles, a pale fungus cried out in the Force as it was crushed beneath her foot. Its death would in turn feed the microscopic life beneath the rocky surface, whose excreta would feed a new generation of fungus. 

Life and death, entwined, impossible to peel apart. There was no way through life that did no harm, that incurred no penalty; there was no erasing the darkness, though someone might certainly pretend it gone. “The Jedi spoke of balance,” she said, wonderingly. “But they never achieved that. Not really.”

When you turned you back on both Sith and Jedi, when you accepted death as well as life--what was left?

“I understand,” she breathed, and surrendered.

Energy flowed through her but did not remain with her. The Force was the circuit and she was only a small and short-lived conduit in that greater whole. She was the missing conductor that closed and integrated the circle and made a complete whole of the two disparate halves.

She held on, though it burned her from the inside out, and when it was done, when she was done, there was a new shape to the Force around her, and she smiled as she fell to the ground.


	33. Chapter 33

Once the firefight had died down, Jannah organized Company 77 and its new ex-stormtrooper allies to move the wounded. She made the troopers remove their helmets, and any of them that wanted a name, she gave one right then and there.

“We don’t have time to play meet-and-greet,” objected Zorii. “We need to evacuate before the Resistance fleet blows this ship and all the rest.”

Jannah looked up from tying an electrical-tape sling about the neck and arm of a friendly trooper. “They know we’re here. They’ll wait.” She looked the trooper in the eye. He was just a kid, not more than eighteen. “D’iah,” she told him. “Welcome, D’iah.”

Zorii grabbed her arm when she stood. “Listen--”

“I _have_ been listening to you all the while I’ve known you, Zorii Bliss.” Jannah put her hand on the side of Zorii’s helmet. “What is it you’re afraid of? I don’t for a moment believe it’s a slow evacuation.”

Zorii went very still. Then one hand lifted, brushing Jannah’s aside, and triggered the faceplate of her helmet. The face inside was asymmetrical: one side full of cheek and brown of eye, the other crazed with scarred lines, its cornea painted over in white. “ _I’m_ not afraid of anything,” she said acidly. “Other people usually are, though.”

Jannah reached for her again. Zorii shoulder’s tightened, but she didn’t move away, and she didn’t flinch when Jannah’s fingers touched her bare cheek this time, tracing a line carved by ancient shrapnel. Her other arm went around Zorii’s shoulders and her foot between Zorii’s ankles, tipping her backward. She kissed Zorii slowly, like a promise. “I used to be a stormtrooper,” she said, into the space of Zorii’s mouth. “It takes more than a pretty face and a couple of scars to scare _me_.”

They lingered there another moment, Zorii’s hands on Jannah’s back. Then, with a sigh, they both parted at once. “Ships don’t evacuate themselves,” said Zorii gruffly. But when she bent to heft Rose to her feet, she left her faceplate open.

Jannah got Finn moving, and turned to look over the carnage left in the hall. “Leave the dead,” she ordered sadly. “We can’t spare the hands to carry them, except in memory.”

The hangar showed evidence that a firefight had already happened. There was nothing left to do for the stormtroopers who’d paid their lives to hold a failing front, no souls here alive to be bought back and redeemed. Jannah and Finn paused at the foot of an unguarded gunship, and Finn looked back the way they’d come. 

“Are you ready?” Jannah asked gently.

He smiled, despite the arm that protectively cradled his aching side. “Yeah. I’m ready.”

They boarded. The hangar bay doors parted and released them into the storm.

* * *

After all she’d done--to save him; to save them all?--Poe was afraid to touch her where she lay on the ground. 

Part of him was sure that she’d already burned to nothing, that she was already reduced to the ash that now palled the air and rimed the walls, and at the slightest brush of his fingers she’d disintegrate once and for all.

But part of him rejected that possibility, refused to accept that Force and fate had brought him to Exegol just to let him fail, and fall, and watch her die. Why should he be here, if it hadn’t been to do something, finally, here, now?

He took a deep breath and eased her onto her back.

Even through her clothes, she radiated pure heat; he shook his hands out, still feeling the sting. But she didn’t blow away on the wind. That was something, at least. “Rey!” Hope brought new confidence. He brushed the hair off her face and found her skin blisteringly hot to the touch. Her chest still moved, her fingers still twitched. But there was … an absence to her. Something missing. She looked almost threadbare, as if light would shine through her if she stood between him and the sun. “Come on,” he said. “Open your eyes. I’m a general and that’s an order.”

“I’m not one of your troops.” But her eyes blinked open anyway. Her lips were crusted with dirt and blood; they moved for a moment before more words scraped out. “I told you to go.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not one of _your_ troops either.” Her lids drooped again and he shook her, covering his hand with his sleeve so he could slide it under her head without being scalded. “No, no, hey. Hey! Look at me. Stay with me here.” An idea sparked. “Do that _thing_ you did before. To me after Hast Ovath.” He took her hand and put it on his shoulder, where a scar should have lingered but didn’t. Through his flightsuit, he could feel the heat of her skin. “You said you pushed some of your life into me. Right?” He pressed her fingers into him. Smoke curled up from the orange fabric where she made contact, along with a burnt, acrid odor. “Take it back now. Whatever you gave me. Take it back!”

“No.” Rey curled her fingers into her palm, refusing. “I’m … almost gone. Too easy to take too much. I might easily kill you.” She smiled. She felt so light, now, without the Force coursing through her. Like less than she had been, and more. She closed her eyes and tears spilled from under her closed lids. “I’m not afraid to die,” she said, and it was almost true.

“You’re the strongest person I know. I trust you to take what you need. Hey!” He shook her again when her expression started to slacken. “And if that’s not enough, I’m not the only person whose life you’ve touched. You ask, and they’ll say--Rey!” He peeled her fingers apart and slammed the heel of her palm against him, ignoring where his skin blistered against her. “Just _take it_!”

Rey took. 

From Poe, first, for he was there and he was offering and she did not want yet to go into the warm waiting embrace in the Force of all those who had gone before her, she wanted to find a way back to the shelter of self and carve a space there big enough to hold her soul again. He held a spark, and she took it. 

It wasn’t enough.

 _Take him, take all of him_ , urged a shadowed corner of her mind, _live and walk and feel the sun on your face!_ But that part of her was covetous of more than mere life and if she destroyed him now she would destroy much more than him alone, things she would just as soon save, and maybe it was enough that he would have the sun on his face again, that the galaxy could be, would be, free for so many beings to live as they wished.

But wait: while she could not drink down the life in him, it was still there, and it was part of _all_ life, and there was such a _tremendous_ quantity of life spread all across the great gleaming universe. She took what he offered and then she reached farther, through him, across him, and she asked.

 _Rey?_ A first connection igniting: Finn, not so very far away. Aching, weary, but sparking with victory. Rey heard him in her head as clearly as if he had his mouth to her ear. _Rey, what do you need?_

And not just him. She heard Rose, tersely reminding herself to keep breathing, and her words reminded Rey too. She heard Chewbacca, an oasis of calm and comfort; she heard Lando Calrissian telling the odds exactly what he thought of them. 

She heard Maz Kanata: _Rey. We are with you. Be at peace._

And she heard Ben Solo, a shout through the hum of voices, a haughty demand for her attention above the rest: _Yes. I can help you._

She heard a constellation of pilots and command crews, abuzz with orders to stay on target, to divert power to fore shields or aft, to focus on this target or that one. She heard infantry beating retreat, she heard technicians begging engines to keep firing and shields to hold their integrity only just so much longer, please, please. Other minds too, other beings, a beautiful myriad, that she didn’t recognize and could not place, in a thousand strange languages. 

_Who are you?_ asked one small voice, bright and sparkling with the clarity of youth. _Are you like me?_

She was--they were--a bubble of surprise and wonder broke around her.

She asked. They offered, so many of them, so much.

Through Poe, it all came pouring back to her, a waterfall of love and joy and generosity--of life--given without condition.

In the same spirit, she accepted it.

* * *

For a moment, Rey had been filled with the love and life of an entire galaxy. Then it ended, and she broke off into her own small body again, lying on the cold damp ground.

It was good to be back.

She got her feet under her, testing her weight, and Poe helped pull her upright. “I’m fine,” she protested, “I’m fine! Are _you_ all right?”

“I am zero percent killed,” he said, letting go of her. “You did it; I knew you could do it!” His jubilant grin faded. “The bad news is that this damn planet ate our ride out of here.”

Having to worry about something as mundane as an escape route brought near-hysterical laughter bubbling up out of Rey. “I’m starting to think you shouldn’t be trusted with ships! You take terrible care of them.” 

“Oh yeah? Have _you_ got a ticket off this rock you’re not telling me about?”

“No. But I believe something will turn up. After all, there’s an entire victorious Resistance fleet right over our heads.” She paused. “Why did you leave the fight to come here?”

His face clouded over. She knew he was replaying their argument on Kef Bir, remembering things better left unsaid, things that should have been spoken but weren’t. “It was looking for a while there like it might be the end. Didn’t think anyone should have to face that alone.” A flicker of humor. “Besides, I hear I can be a pretty difficult guy, which I figured would be useful in a tight corner.”

“Thank you. For being here. And I’ve been thinking …” Her smile turned crooked. “What you said to me, after Hast Ovath. I think you were right, you know. You could.”

“I could what--?” He hit a hard stop while rewinding through old conversations. She watched his expression shift in the manner of someone who has just discovered that two plus two have suddenly decided to add up to nineteen. 

He reached for her.

She met him halfway.

* * *

Scraping and bumping along, BB-8 trundled into a massive chamber lit from the outside by the bleary storm-smothered light of Exegol’s sun. He was delighted to find both of his favorite organics, alive and seemingly unharmed! They were apparently practicing some variety of cyclical breathing, a procedure of whose purpose BB-8 was unaware and which he felt was highly unlikely to be beneficial to either of them in terms of carbon dioxide clearance. He burbled happily, albeit with a mild note of scolding, and bounced across the floor to spin to a stop beside their feet.

They broke apart then, Rey dropping to her knees beside him. “BB-8!” she exclaimed. She straightened his antenna lovingly and his circuits veritably buzzed with pride. “I’m so glad to see you.” 

BB-8 was glad to see her too and, he advised, he had something very exciting he wanted to show them.

He knew the way now--he had mapped it on his way through--and led them back through a twisting, twining series of tunnels to the wide-open space beyond. In the sky, sparks swirled and danced: as BB-8 watched, the tiny wedges of Star Destroyers scattered above lit like tiny candles, one by one. 

On the plain below, several of the same sort of ships waited, up close and personal. In their size, they seemed an impossible relation to the distant miniatures overhead. Here, they lay lifeless, some even half-finished, their glittering bones thrown open to the eye (or ocular sensor, as the case might be). At least one, BB-8 announced, seemed to be in a state of very near completion!  
Rey turned to Poe. They had interlocked the fingers of one hand apiece during their passage through the tunnels, which BB-8 supposed was probably a good idea to prevent one of them from falling behind. “We can fly that. Can’t we?”

“We can fly anything,” Poe proclaimed, and BB-8 squealed his agreement.

* * *

The celebrations on Yavin 4 were wild enough that, when a Star Destroyer touched lightly down in the middle, no one really batted an eye. There were hundreds of people dancing around in nearly-full stormtrooper armor, even a few black-suited ex-officers; why not a ship of the line as well?

At least one person was expecting this arrival, though. Finn carried Rose in his arms as he strode into its long shadow. He waited, Rose’s breath shallow and hot against his neck, for a few interminable minutes after the ship had landed.

Some things were worth waiting for.

At last a ramp descended and then Rey and Poe ran crying and shouting out of the ship, sweeping up Finn and Rose together in their arms, spinning in joyous circles. There was an electric energy, flowing--from Rey? From Finn? Through him?--and then Rose was laughing too, sobbing relief from the pain of her wounds, clutching his neck and their friends’ with renewed strength.

There was music--how did people produce instruments so _fast_?--and singing and dancing, Zorii and Jannah bouncing together to the hypnotic drumbeat of an old Corellian anthem, Rose and Maz two-stepping around an imagined circle as people cheered and clapped, Finn and Poe joined arms and spun each other in increasingly wild circles. BB-8 and R2-D2 veered joyfully through the throng, barely staying out from underfoot and occasionally cruising full-speed into C-3PO, who loudly and joyfully proclaimed his distaste for the whole affair. Some of the pilots had returned to the air, and the song grew quiet when their engines roared overhead and fireworks sparkled in their wake.

Rey was the first to drift away from the festivities: on her own but not _alone_ , no, never that, not anymore. A faint mist gathered at the edge of the jungle, where the shadows grew long with the fading of the day. If she looked closely, some of that mist resolved into discrete shapes. Bodies. If she looked closer yet, she recognized some of those faces. Her breath caught.

An old white man, gray-bearded and quick-eyed; another, younger, who might have been a junior cousin of Luke’s and Leia’s, with sad tired eyes. A small green alien, of a species she had never seen before, who looked up at Rey with sparkling speculation; a black man with his arms folded and his head cocked to the side in challenge or in wonder. Dozens more, spilling out behind them to either side; hundreds, perhaps. Thousands? Behind them, the sun sank into the waiting nest of treetops, but the ghosts cast no shadow.

One split off from the mass, approaching Rey. Master Skywalker. “Rey,” he said. “You’ve done what we could not. You’ve achieved a most delicate balance, in a place where we never thought to look for it.” His smile was fragile, but genuine. “There is a darkness in you, and in that, the galaxy has found its shelter.”

“Wrong,” said the green alien, “can masters be. Wrong too you will sometimes be, Rey. But right, also, often enough. Right and wrong: in this, too, a balance must be sought.” His hands twisted on his little walking-stick. “A new way forward will you chart and fortunate indeed will be those who walk this path.”

She pressed her hand over her heart. “I am glad I had you, Master Skywalker, to walk beside me for a while.”

His smile grew stronger, even as the ghost dissolved into nothing more than humid air. Rey lingered a moment longer, feeling the soft imprint on the Force left by their presence. Then she walked back toward the rest of the group.

It felt like going home.


	34. Epilogue

The city of Canto Bight glittered by night, in the way that only stolen finery can.

Amid a fleet of gleaming leisure ships and pleasure craft stationed on the ground awaiting the beck and call of their masters, a battered old cruiser touched down with a creak. It shuddered hard, once, settling on its stabilizers. An elegant close-jump hopper parked nearby tipped over on its lander and shattered its rose-tinted windshield.

Finn strode down the ramp with a purpose. The length of his steps only increased when a pair of agitated attendants flanked him, shouting at him about where he was allowed to leave his vessel and stationing fees and dress codes. At the exit from the docking lot into the casino, he turned and smiled ingratiatingly at them both. “I’m sorry, gentlemen,” he said, and flashed a badge from his pocket. “I’m here as an agent of the Intersystem Governance Council. Am I correct in understanding that you’ve been relying on _child labor_ on these premises?”

A great deal of sputtering ensued, the production of work permits and countersigned waivers. Nonetheless, within five minutes Finn was crouching beside a bunk where a sandy-haired white boy sat, forehead creased with doubt. “You can do special things sometimes,” Finn told him. “Can’t you? Move things without touching them. Make people change their mind all of a sudden.”

A little amber-skinned girl piped up, peeping out from behind the dingy room’s door. “He got the minder to give me and Bex more rations when we were sick. The minder didn’t _want_ to, but she _did_.”

Finn smiled. “I know someone who’d love to meet you,” he told the boy, and held out his hand. Hesitantly, the boy reached out and shook it.

“But not the rest of us,” the little girl said. She retreated a little farther behind the door when he stood up and turned to her. “We’re not special like he is. You don’t want us.”

Finn knelt down in front of her. “You’re not special like he is,” he corrected, “but you are special, and you’d better believe you’re coming too.”

* * *

A First Order transport, which was not really a First Order _anything_ anymore, alit just outside of the shipyard on Yavin 4, its landing struts settling a few inches deep into the heavy peat where the jungle shadows encroached.

Rey was waiting to meet it, and ready to throw her arms around the wookiee that marched first down the ramp. “Chewie!” she cried, and buried her face in his fur. He returned the embrace gently, growling his inquiries about her and their shared friends. “Yes, they’re all fine.” The happiness in her face shifted toward somber. “We lost so many good people at Exegol.” She squeezed his giant arm with one hand. “But I’m glad you weren’t one of them.”

More heavy footsteps rang out behind Chewbacca. A pair of prisoners: neither wearing First Order uniforms, but there was a crispness to their march and a haughty lift of their chins that belied their nature. Their wrists were bound in front of them, and a heavy hand rested on each of their shoulders, impelling them forward.

Ben stopped when he saw Rey standing beside Chewbacca. “I didn’t know you were here. I thought you’d be busy with the new school …”

“The school can see to itself for a bit.” A small squadron of guards had trotted up behind Rey: a pair of Resistance ground troops, a man from Company 77, and an aging Rebellion-era shock trooper with a limp. Rey nodded to them as they took the prisoners into custody and led them away. “They’ll have a fair trial.”

“And what about _my_ trial?” The words came laced with venom; Ben compressed his lips and tried again. “Has the Governance Council decided my fate?”

“They’ve agreed to let you fulfill your sentence in service to the galaxy.” She smiled, but her words were tight and clipped. “It’ll be up to you to earn that generosity.”

He nodded, not meeting her eyes. Chewbacca rumbled, deep in his throat, and Ben appended: “I’ll do what I can. Thank you, for speaking on my behalf.”

“It was your mother’s good name more than anything I said. Oh--there’s one more thing.” There was a wary shift in his posture, and she shook her head. “Not from the Council; this was my idea. Chewie, come on. Follow me.”

When Ben saw where she was leading him and Chewbacca, he stopped short. “No. No, I can’t.”

Rey stopped and laid a hand on the Millennium Falcon’s landing struts. “You should. It belongs with you, Chewbacca. Han was your family, too.” Chewbacca’s chest rose proudly at being looped in among the Solo clan. “He would have wanted you to have it.”

“I can’t,” Ben said again, but there was no force behind the words. He moved past her without looking at her, almost in a trance, moving up the ramp. His footfalls barely made a noise, as if he were afraid of waking something long left sleeping inside the old ship.

Chewbacca put his arm around Rey’s shoulder and pulled her tight against his side. “Don’t thank me yet,” she said, a teasing lilt to her voice now that Ben had gone. “You’d better get out of here before General Calrissian hears about this.”

* * *

Finn and his charges disembarked from the cruiser beneath the hot Yavin sun. The children from Canto Bight shed jackets and squinted, unused to the bright light and humidity. Around the open yard, new construction was apparent: low-lying buildings, barracks-like, but open to light and air. In the middle of the open space, a small group of serious-faced youths were running through a drill with staffs, fighting invisible opponents. Other children ran from building to building, shouting about supper; orange-suited pilots and uniformed officers strolled between boxes of cargo and ducked under laundry strung between roofs. 

Zorii and Jannah looked up from stowing tanks of bacta into the hold of a midsize freighter, an old junker that looked as if it would barely hold itself aloft without the weight of cargo. Not exactly the same quality as Zorii’s old ship, but it had been free, a price with which even she couldn’t find fault. From a panel over the engines, Babu Frik poked his head out. Wrapped in a tangle of wire though he was, he waved at Finn, calling a jaunty hello. “Hanya dab!”

Rose and General Calrissian came hurrying out from the temple to meet Finn, counting up the children and calculating rooming assignments and food rations on a pair of antiquated data pads. Rose lingered just long enough to touch Finn on the arm before picking up a pair of twins--one on each hip--and ushering the children off in three separate groups. The littlest ones clung to each other, hand to hand, as they stared around at all there was to see.

Another ship had touched down not far across the yard, this one a streamlined transport. A few passengers had been waiting to board; others streamed down. One of them cut through the others’ wake, calling Finn’s name. 

“Poe!” They embraced, then pulled apart to take each other’s measure. “How’s Council life treating you?”

“Too much time on a spaceship that I’m not flying,” Poe groused. There was gray in his hair that Finn had never noticed before. “But we’re making progress. Both Coruscant and Corellia agreed to send ships for a liberation force to clear out all the scummy systems still hunkered down in the Outer Rim.” Longing flashed in his eyes as he changed the subject. “How about your mission? Having adventures out there without me?”

“It’s slow going.” Finn grinned knowingly. “And not all that adventurous so far, really. Slavers and syndicate bosses like going after the helpless--”

“Which you are decidedly _not_.”

“But every kid we save helps. That’s one more person who’s not lost anymore. Not alone.”

Poe clapped him on the shoulder. “Look at us, out there saving the galaxy.” His eyes slid past Finn. “Where’s, uh--”

Finn grinned. “Come on. I know where to look.”

* * *

Rey sat cross-legged upon the soft soil, part of a circle with eight children and teenagers. MAny of them stared at her raptly, hanging on her every word; the others, especially the eldest, had doubt creasing their faces as they listened.

“It’s all yours,” she was saying. “And no one can take that away from you. No one should want to. Your love, your passion, your caring: that is one weapon in your arsenal. Your anger: that is another.” She hesitated. “Or--perhaps we should say, one tool in your kit.” Her smile was gentle and genuine. “I’m figuring a great deal of this out alongside you. Perhaps one of you will be able to explain it better.”

Movement outside the circle caught her eye. Finn and Poe stood at the edge of the jungle, waiting. She stood. “Meditate on these thoughts for a minute or two, please, before you go to the evening meal.”

They strode through the jungle, side by side, exchanging idle thoughts--a welcome reprieve from the heavy business of government and guidance that occupied them each day. The backs of her knuckles brushed against Poe’s, and she took his hand in hers, with an electric jolt of happiness.

A sharp drop-off brought their stroll to an end, where the ground fell away into a deep valley. The sun had nested deep into its bed in the clouds already, and Finn cast a disapproving eye at the sky. “It’s late,” he said. “We should head back to base.”  
He turned, Poe too, but Rey lingered, watching the first stars collect at the margins of the sky.

“Rey?” asked Finn. He slung his arm around her neck. On her other side, Poe did the same, reaching across her to clap Finn on the shoulder. “What are you looking at?”

Her eyes were wet. She dried them on her knuckles and leaned into their embrace. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just a beautiful sunset to be able to share with my friends.”

And it was.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for sticking with me through this whole thing! I hope you enjoyed the ride as much as I did.
> 
> If you noticed the renumbering of the chapters, it's because I noticed while getting near the end here that I still had a few chapters left despite the last chapter in my Scrivener file being Scene 31. Looking back, this appears to be because my Scrivener doc included "Scene 14.5", "Scene 17.5", and "Scene 20 but for real this time". hmm.
> 
> This project was for me, first and foremost. I was so disappointed coming out of TROS, with the capstone to this saga I grew up on. I’m a Star Wars baby; I was born in 1983, I remember dancing to the Star Wars theme on LP in my parents’ living room as a little one. These days I work out in a STAR WARS MADE ME GAY tank top. So I just wanted an ending on the story that made me happy, more than anything else.
> 
> The ground rules I set out for myself:  
> -I don’t get to use Leia in a way that wasn’t available to JJA. No new lines, no footage that doesn’t already exist. :[  
> -”Disney won’t let us have two main characters be queer wahhh” This is bullshit but FINE. Still slipping in a passing reference to queer Poe though you’ll blink if you miss it.  
> -Two unnamed characters kissing for a split second is not queer rep and I will do better. Christ.  
> -Redemption = death is Bad and I reject it with every fiber of my being
> 
> I kept a few good bits and lines from the original film because why throw baby out with bathwater; it also made me laugh that this story ended up converging on some similar themes and throughlines from the leaked Treverrow script. What’s the opposite of getting jossed? I thought myself terribly original in December when I started this thing, oh well.


End file.
